Yesterday I downloaded Dev10 from the MSDN site and installed it on my Win7 VM on my Mac. The first thing I noticed was that it ran like a three legged dog – that is to say, it was slow. 
Hmm, I thought (I actually make that noise when I think) I have this VM set up to provide the maximum recommended RAM and yet this is still soooo slooooooow; I know it’s a beta product but even so, surely it shouldn’t run this slowly. And then I remembered… Dev10 uses WPF heavily. I remembered Oliver had had a performance issue with WPF and he had solved it by (counter intuitively) turning off the 3D acceleration on the VM he was using. So I tried the same thing and lo and behold, my Dev10 installation is now running at a sensible speed.
So if you are using Dev10 on a VM (and if you aren’t why not, it’s beta don’t you know) and you are having performance issues, then try disabling the 3D acceleration on your VM and see if things improve.
May 20, 2009 at 7:13 am |
[...] Removing Slowness from Visual Studio 2010 (Dev10) – Gary Short shares a tip which may help you gain better performance for the new VS2010 Beta when running in a virtual machine. [...]
May 26, 2009 at 12:29 pm |
This is also a sensible decision with VMWare Workstation on the PC – disable DirectX 9.0 support within your virtual machine.
When installing Blend 3 Preview on Win7 RC prior to installing VS2010, I discovered the installer is written in WPF. I found this out because I could only see the buttons on the setup wizard if I tabbed to them. Not sure what options I installed with Blend as I couldn’t read anything else on the wizard. When I started Blend 3 to check it had installed, I received a blank start up dialog. It was at that point I disabled DirectX 9.0 support, and Blend 3 ran perfectly.
Fortunately I found all this out before installing VS2010 and blaming that. Hate to think how badly that drew itself on screen.