When I was at Microsoft I worked on two different teams that were part of the larger Developer Division – Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) and Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). While neither of these was the core VS team, we were close enough to get occasional wisdom from them. One such piece of wisdom dealt with cases when Visual Studio slows down dramatically, especially when debugging. The solution was simple, just exit VS altogether, navigate to the folder where your .sln file is located and delete the .suo file there. I don’t recall exactly why this works, but apparently the information in this aut0-generated file can get into a state where it causes VS to work way too hard to resolve otherwise simple problems. Note that when you re-open the project in Visual Studio, all of your breakpoints, open files and similar session state information will be lost, but hopefully your slowness problems will be resolved.
If this does not solve your Visual Studio performance woes, here are a couple of other links which may be useful:
- Microsoft KB 920805: Describes a slow response time in Visual Basic 2005 projects and a link to a hotfix to install.
- Visual Studio 2008 PAINFULLY SLOW!!: A thread on social.msdn.microsoft.com about performance issues in VS. The primary answer in this thread has to do with changing an option in Internet Explorer which causes VS to check on the internet for certificate revocations by third-party control/library providers.
Hope this helps someone.
