Visual Studio: How to make its UI fast, lean and minimal?

Question

Visual Studio can be quite slow to open and work with. The menus and auto-hide windows can get sluggish and commands take a while to start. What are the list of things one can do to make the UI of Visual Studio load faster and operate faster? What settings can one change to make it feel lean and minimal?

PS: I know Visual Studio Express is way leaner and faster. However, I rely on some Visual Studio addons, and addons are not supported in Express.

PS2: I have already closed all unnecessary windows. All diagnostic windows are on auto-hide. And all the tool bars are closed. I work almost completely using keyboard shortcuts.

Answer 1

Without knowing the information I posted in the comments I will say the typical stuff. Turn off all addons, if you are using vista or 7 switch to basic vs aero, check all running processes. This is where I would start.

Answer 2

I know that VS 2008 slowed down from VS 2005. I feel this pain every once in a while when im doing a quick Find or Find-Replace, or Find-In-Solution...etc. The UI sometimes isn't as fast as your hands are (when you're using keyboard shortcuts).

1. I found that just slowing down sometimes is the way to do it (it sucks, but then again, so does many things about Windows).

2. If it's load times youre concerned about; disable the startup stuff (from the Options menu). Here you can choose to load a blank screen upon VS load AND not to subscribe to any news feeds. (this helps alot depending on your internet connection).

3. you can also, via Options, adjust the visual animations that occur, as well as just disabling them altogether.

If there's anything else im missing, which im sure there is, i'd really like to know as well!

Answer 3

One thing that can potentially speed up visual studio is to disable document navigation.

Go to Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> and uncheck 'Navigation Bar'.

This is definitately an option in 2008, pretty sure its in 2005 too.

Another option to try:

Go to Tools -> Options -> Text Editor and Uncheck 'Track Changes'.

Answer 4

Here are some tips, actually collected from following blog posts

VS2008

Improve Visual Studio's Source View Performance
Tips to improve performance of visual studio IDE
Visual Studio 2008 Tweaks

VS2010

Visual Studio 2010 Performance Part 1: Startup
Visual Studio 2010 Performance Part 2: Text Editor
Visual Studio 2010 Performance Part 3: A Technical Update

Tips

• Turn off background HTML validation. Go to Tools / Options and select Text Editor / HTML / Validation in the tree view on the left side. Uncheck the Show Errors check box.

• Turn off AutoRecover. Go to Tools / Options and select Environment / AutoRecover in the tree view. Uncheck the Save AutoRecover check box.

• Close your property grid (View / Properties Window)

  • web.config should not have <compilation batch=”false” />

• Turn off AutoToolboxPopulate (Tools -> Options -> Windows Forms Designer set AutoToolboxPopulate False)

• Turn off Track Active item (Tools -> Options -> Projects and Solutions uncheck Track Active Item in Solution Explorer)

• Disable Navigation Bar(Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> C#, uncheck Navigation bar)

• Move file in App_Code into a class library project

• Disable validation Options for HTML Editing (Tools -> Options -> Validation -> Clear show error checkbox)