It is worth to upgrade from VS2008 to 2010 for C/C++ programming? I'm interested in IDE, compiler speed and code generation (i don't care about new C++0x features for now). I tested early beta releases and the WPF interface worked sluggish in comparison to the 2008 IDE.
Thank you.
The built-in IntelliSense in VS2010 is a million times better than what was in VS2008. It's perhaps not quite as good as what's available with Visual Assist X, but IMO if you're not using VAX, then it's worth the upgrade just for that.
The build system is now based on msbuild as well, which doesn't actually make it all that much faster (I never ran any tests, but it "feels" about the same to me).
As for the interface, I've never had any problems with it. It seems about as fast (if not, faster in some cases) than the VS2008 interface. That doesn't say a lot about how good it is, of course, just how bad VS2008 was in comparison :-)
VS2010 RTM run much faster than beta. With the new WPF UI, if the development machine has RAM and a pretty good graphic card, it should run faster. It runs faster than VS2008 on my four years old laptop with 2GB ram and Radeon X1300 graphic card (I haven't experience any slow down others are mentioning yet). Anything to do with graphic in general run faster. The text editor also let you zoom in, good for presentation / code review and you don't need to mess with your font setting. Some other improvement on the text editor includes box selection where you can perform the same change on multiple lines at the same time, save a bit of copy and paste time. There is also improvement on code snippets management and you can also make your own start page to make it more useful.
The code correction and analyzation they did for native VC++ intellisense is incredible. But they completely dropped intellisense for C++/CLI, more info here: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/459187/intellisense-unavailable-for-c-cli
On my machine VS2010 is visibly more sluggish than VS2008 when typing, probably because of the load of the much-improved Intellisense. It crashes about as much as 2008, starts up quicker, but loads solutions more slowly.
But VS6 + VisualAssist blew it out of the water for performance, and crashed less often.