It's been bugging me for a while now, but the ASP.NET designer in VS 2008 can be terribly slow for editing even the simplest of pages. The machines we use are not bleeding edge, but one would think that a 2Ghz Dual Core AMD 3800+ with 3Gb of RAM and a 7200RPM 120Gb hard drive would perform better than it does.
To quantify the problem, opening the design view for a page with a 3-5 of textboxes, a dropdown, and a DataGrid may take 30-45 seconds ... or longer. Really complex screens can sometimes take several minutes to open. And once open, the designer is very sluggish - clicking on a control can take a couple of seconds to take effect. The properties window doesn't always update correctly. Right-click menus can take several seconds to appear.
We've tried defragmenting our drives, killing unnecessary processes, upgrading to SP1, and even re-installing the development environment but the problem still persists.
Has anyone else out there observed similar performance issues, and if so, does anyone have any suggestions on how to improve the performance? For example, are there any IDE features we could turn off (i.e. intellisense) that might help out? If you aren't seeing any issues I would be curious to know what specs (CPU, RAM, HD) your machines are configured with.
EDIT: Some additional facts and corrections. First, a quick correction, we in fact have 7200RPM drives from Western Digital, not 5200 RPM models.
Second, based on some investigation into where the bottlenecks are, when the designer is loading it seems like there is a lot of dead time - < 20% CPU, just a bit of I/O wait. But the overall effect is very slow.
We do use Resharper in our projects, but disabling this add-on does not perceptibly improve the performance of the designer.