Tamir Khason - Just code » .NET 4.0 http://khason.net Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves. Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:37:40 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Visual Studio Face-to-Face battle http://khason.net/tech/visual-studio-face-to-face-battle/ http://khason.net/tech/visual-studio-face-to-face-battle/#comments Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:05:56 +0000 Tamir http://khason.net/tech/visual-studio-face-to-face-battle/ ]]> Yesterday Visual Studio 2010 was released. This is very exciting, however from the moment I played with very first preview versions I had concerns regarding the performance of it code editor. So today I had some time to perform small face-to-face battle between different versions of Visual Studio – 2005, 2008 and 2010 (Sorry, I did not found VS2002 to test).

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Environment

I used very slow machine with 256Mb of RAM running Windows XP as a reference for comparison. First of all I installed each one of those programs. I used customized installation to install only C# programming modules.

Then I tested cold start (first application start) and hot start (average of 5 forecoming starts), creation and opening of new console application project. And finally the real world test. Typing in, compilation and run of “Hello World” sample. This includes opening of context menus, tools and options.

I used “Hello World” sample from MSDN for type-in experience. Just for reference, I used small program I wrote to calculate typing speed (this takes into account that most of text is generated by the same macros and shortcuts e.g. “cw”)

Comparison

  VS2005 VS2008 VS2010
Installation 10 min 20 min 40 min
Cold start 1.2 sec 3.9 sec 28 sec
Hot start 0.3 sec 1.3 sec 4.5 sec
Start new project (Ctrl-Shift-N) 0.2 sec 3.2 sec 2 sec
Create new Console Application 16 sec 3 sec 24 sec
Clear working screen (Ctrl-A + Del) 0.4 sec 0.2 sec 1.2 sec
Type in “Hello World” 41 sec 56 sec 1 min 43 sec
Average type rate 93 wpm 68 wpm 35 wpm
Average UI response (how long it takes to open menu/hint) 0.7 sec 1.6 sec 3.5 sec
Installation/Uninstallation disk delta 40Mb 60Mb 2.3Gb*
Memory footprint (for this project) 6Mb 17Mb 65Mb
Disk space required 1.4Gb 2.6Gb 3.9Gb

* Can anybody from DevDiv, please, explain me why when I want to install only C# (this is the only checkbox marked during custom installation), you install for me:
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Conclusion

There are some new and pretty eye-candies for VS2010, also support for newer compilers and interpreter. However, my final verdict is “I disappointed”…

I feel a big degradation of productivity between following versions of Visual Studio. In terms of speed, responsiveness and ability to perform everyday developers’ tasks. That’s right, that there are new features, but we should remember that the main purpose of this program is to support writing code.

I hope that MS DevDiv will take this into account and review it understanding of how development environment should be. I, personally, stay with VS2008 without .NET 4.0 (I have my special opinion about this version of .NET, which worse separate post)

If you old enough, you should remember HomeSite. It was beaten by editor named Notepad.exe (or it variants and alternatives) for HTML developers because of it unresponsiveness and unnecessary cumbersomeness of this program. Running after features killed the main purpose – write effective code fast and correct. This how I forecast the future of Visual Studio. Pity me…

 My hopes

P.S. Sorry, I did not write here for a while. This because of a lot of exiting things I did for the last two years. I promise to write more. Frankly! I swear, I will try to!

UPD 14-Apr: For all people have comments about my production environment and a validity of my measurements there, please see how it looks on my work machine (E8400, 8Gb RAM and NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT)

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