Visual Studio 2010 CTP Performance Tip

Visual Studio 2010 CTP has been available for some time already. So, I guess many of you have already used a chance to give a new version of the famous IDE a try. If you haven’t downloaded it, well I think it’s quite sensible thing to get it. It’s likely to be released at the end of the next year, so you will have a plenty of time to learn all the new features and become a real guru of .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010.

Anyway, the current CTP is shipped as a Virtual PC image that means you cannot expect it run ultra fast. Moreover, the Virtual PC image is packaged with a lot of things that you may need when experiencing the new IDE, I mean they included Team Foundation Server, SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, Office 2007 and Windows Sharepoint Services that are running by default. Wow, that’s a lot and it consumes a lot of memory. But sometimes you don’t need those things at all, for instance, you just want to learn the new features of C# 4.0. Thus, it’s sensible to get rid of unnecessary services, you can always enable them later. So, go to Start –> Administrative Tools –> Services and simply stop and disable automatic running of the services you don’t need.

Personally, I disabled TFS, SQL Server, WSS, IIS, Tablet Input services. Eventually the memory consumption of my virtual machine dropped from about 1 GB to less than 500 MBs.

Mike Borozdin (Twitter)
5 December 2008

The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way. My personal thoughts tend to change, hence the articles in this blog might not provide an accurate reflection of my present standpoint.

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