Visual Studio .NET 2008 - Speed Up XAML Load Times
By Robbe Morris
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Do your XAML files load up in Visual Studio .NET 2008 as slow as mine? Here is a workaround that might help. |
Visual Studio .NET 2008 is an extreme disappointment for me. Its performance is attrocious and the XAML designer support is "weak" to say the very least... "pathetic" if one were to be honest.
The designer is so bad I almost never use it. In fact, I never drag and drop controls from the toolbox. I just rely on my knowledge of the tags and intellisense in the XAML editor.
What infuriates me is that people on the Visual Studio .NET development team put this app through the testing phase, watched this poor performance again and again, and then said "looks good to me... ship it".
I've found that just simply opening the XAML files in XAML mode still takes forever...
To get back some of the lost hours of watching/waiting for it to load, I tried opening up the toolbox and removing every single tab (common, general, and everything else) to the point that there was absolutely nothing in the toolbox.
As it turns out, my hunch was right and this does speed up the load times. Of course, if you work with the designer and need drag and drop functionality on the controls at design time, this tip won't help much. |
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| Biography - Robbe Morris |
| Robbe has been a Microsoft MVP in C# since 2004. He is also the co-founder of EggHeadCafe.com which provides .NET articles, book reviews, software reviews, and software download and purchase advice. |
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| Article Discussion: Visual Studio .NET 2008 - Speed Up XAML Load Times |
| Robbe Morris posted at Sunday, August 17, 2008 10:51 AM |
| Original Article |
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| Try opening your WPF application solution / project |
| Peter Bromberg replied to Robbe Morris at Sunday, August 17, 2008 3:49 PM |
 | In Expression Blend. It has a much more performant designer with lots better features, Drag-drop of controls from the toolbox, etc.
When you save the Blend work you can switch back to Visual Studio, let it reload the changed files, and all will be well.
You can add Blend to the "Open With" context item. |
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| Speaking of that |
| Robbe Morris replied to Peter Bromberg at Sunday, August 17, 2008 3:58 PM |
| How do you add Blend to the Open With context item? |
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| Right click on your XAML file in Solution Explorer |
| Peter Bromberg replied to Robbe Morris at Sunday, August 17, 2008 4:02 PM |
| and choose the "open with" context item. You'll see an "ADD" button. This will allow you to browse for the blend.exe and select it. Also, if you haven't done so, I would recommend installing Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. It has improvements to the XAML designers. |
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| Will do |
| Robbe Morris replied to Peter Bromberg at Sunday, August 17, 2008 4:04 PM |
| I have SP1 and the performance still sucks. I'll see if blend makes this any less problematic. |
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| There is no question that Microsoft's XAML designers need work. |
| Peter Bromberg replied to Robbe Morris at Sunday, August 17, 2008 4:16 PM |
| In Silverlight, the XAML design surface is "brain dead" - all it can do is render what you have done in code view. Blend is a lot better (if it wasn't, certainly nobody would ever buy it). |
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| Xaml designer speed problem |
| [)ia6l0 iii replied to Peter Bromberg at Friday, October 17, 2008 9:13 AM |
| The toolbox designers seem to save the layouts at a particular location in our local profile folder, which seem to get corrupted due to a Visual Studion Environment Crash.
XAML Designers too have the same problem. I could speed it up on my machine by deleting the contents of the layouts folder location at
C:\Documents and Settings\[%userprofile]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0
It has speeded the designer loading and the toolbox loading too.
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/forumpostsubmission.aspx?topicid=1&forumpostid=10048543 |
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| Speed up XAML designer |
| [)ia6l0 iii replied to Robbe Morris at Friday, October 24, 2008 11:14 AM |
| The toolbox designers seem to save the layouts at a particular location in our local profile folder, which seem to get corrupted due to a Visual Studion Environment Crash. XAML Designers too have the same problem. I could speed it up on my machine by deleting the contents of the layouts folder location at C:\Documents and Settings\[%userprofile]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0 It has speeded the designer loading and the toolbox loading too. |
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