Windows – Saving long ASPX files in Visual Studio 2010

performancevisual studio 2010windows 7

I'm hoping someone can help me out because I'm extremely close to completely bugging out in the office right now…

So here's the deal; we use Visual Studio 2010 (Ultimate) for web development. The application I'm developing right now is pretty large: about 300mb across 8 projects (including 3rd party libraries). Whenever I work on an ASPX or ASCX (actually it seems to be any file with a codebehind or designer file) file that is over about 100/150 lines it can take up to a solid minute to save. And of course, like most programmers, pressing CTRL-SHIFT-S is so ingrained into my head that it's basically an every-other-minute reflex.

I've combed the google machine (and even gasp bing) and found a few things to try but to no avail. I tried disabling any extensions and clearing the MRU cache and all that jazz as well but I still have the same problem. I've also tried disabling (and even uninstalling) Norton Antivirus.

This is the system I'm experiencing the problems on:

  • HP EliteBook 8460w
  • Intel Core i7-2630QM @ 2.00GHz
  • 8GB DDR3 RAM 64-bit
  • Windows 7 Professional w/SP1
  • ATI FirePro M3900 Mobility
  • Toshiba MK5061GSYN 500GB SATA HDD

I considered that perhaps it could be the disk access rate? I have a SSD that I'm going to be installing tonight so I'll update if that ends up fixing it but in the meantime PLEASE if you have any suggestions at all let me know!

Thanks, Jason

Best Answer

There is no way that it should take that long to save an ASP.Net file on a machine of that spec. I would expect that there are other factors involved. Personally, I would recommend reinstalling the whole development environment from Windows up.

You mention an SSD - I would certainly use that as it will improve the performance of the whole environment massively (especially if it's SATA 3 connected to a 6 GB/s mobo). An SSD will improve the install and rebuild time hugely too.

You can consider reducing the pain of reinstalling your development environment in future by booting from a VM image. Having a backup of that image means you can refresh your Visual Studio environment rapidly and get back to a known, fresh state. Hansleman talks about this here for Win 7, and again here for Win 8. The Rinat Abdullin also does similar but uses Linux as his base OS - see here for details.

Hope that helps!

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