Hints to speed up mobile debugging with Visual Studio 2008 C++

Question

I'm debugging a C++ MFC Windows mobile 6 application using Visual Studio 2008 across a USB ActiveSync link. It works ok, but it is very slow. e.g. Adding a new watch for an integer vairable takes ~20 secs. Task manager shows devenv.exe as using 50% CPU at this time, e.g. all cycles on one core, so the problem appears to be CPU bound rather than IO bound. I've confirmed this by using an emulator rather than live device, which isn't much quicker.

The environment also includes Visual Assist inside VS2008, and Microsoft Security Essentials, all on XP SP3. Plenty of physical and virtual memory still available when debugging.

Any hints on how to improve debugging speed in this context?

Answer 1

Try to use TCP/IP transport instead of the ActiveSync provider. It is slight faster though.

Answer 2

Did you try to reinstall your Visual Studio? or did you reproduce this behavior on another desktop?
It shouldn't take 20 seconds for that task.