Is Visual Studio 2010's WPF interface a cause for performance concern?

Question

Hi,

I have installed the latest beta of Visual Studio 2010 Team Edition at work and so far I have been enjoying it, though you need to dig deep to appreciate the new features (obviously, you can't just use historical debugging without writing any code to debug).

However, I don't see much benefit for me in the interface going to WPF (even with all the diagrams for dependency matrixes etc). What worries me though is that I have a project (at home) which is 70 projects and growing. I load this in Visual Studio 2008 Pro Edition (at home) and get decent performance, though I haven't done any builds till I hit a release (load times of the project is naturally slow and I know a better hd can help with this). Is there any evidence to support my concern that WPF may slow Visual Studio 2010 down and make it a bit of a dog with a solution of my size?

Thanks

Answer 1

Considering that WPF is built for line-of-business class software, I would hope that using it would not cause performance problems.

Answer 2

I was listening to a hanselminutes podcast on the WPF editor and they seemed to indicate that performance was OK but hadn't been completely optimized which should be the case for release. The thing is that the text editor itself isn't necessarily the performance bottleneck in VS, it's the stuff that's happening behind the scenes to perform highlighting, intellisense etc.

One thing I believe that will possibly improve performance is that there's is much better support for plugins for the WPF editor so a lot of the things that required you to jump through a lot of hoops with the old editor should be a whole lot simpler now and require a lot less magic happening in the background.

Answer 3

Allow me to chime in as a guy working specifically on Visual Studio 2010 UI...

By "latest beta" I assume that you mean beta 1. If so, keep in mind that its intent was more to showcase the features, and it preceded a lot of optimization work. We do take performance very seriously, and there is a lot of attention dedicated specifically to making it work fast. This goes not just for the common UI, by the way, but for all parts of VS - editor, project system etc - and, of course, the underlying frameworks as well (WPF in particular). So, before judging on VS2010 performance, I would highly recommend waiting for the next beta (no, I can't tell you when, sorry...), which will have a lot of that stuff in it.

One important thing that may or may not affect you: WPF has an inevitable (well, so far at least, I don't know if they're planning to do anything about it in future releases) performance hit when used over Remote Desktop, because it can't just send a stream of commands corresponding to GDI primitives, and has to remote invalidated and redrawn regions as bitmaps - read this blog post for more info. As that blog post notes, however, there are some tricks to minimize the performance hit, and we do use them - try running beta 1 over RD, and see if you can spot any visual differences compared to local...

All that said, for the use case you specify - 70 projects in a single solution - any potential slowdown from the use of WPF will likely be dwarfed by costs associated with managing those projects to the point of complete irrelevance.