Developer Tools & Visual Studio 2010 Slow Startup Issues

I sent some hints/tips to some of the developers I work with recently and it has just occurred to me that there are others out there that might also find them handy so I thought I’d blog about them as well.

LINQPad

http://linqpad.net/
A query tool for LINQ.  I've been making heavy use of LINQ-to-SQL in a recent project and this has come in handy a couple of times to debug things.

WPF Toolkit

http://wpf.codeplex.com/
I've used this before for it’s Themes, but am making heavy use of the DataGrid for a recent application.

Some more links specific to the DataGrid
http://windowsclient.net/wpf/wpf35/wpf-35sp1-toolkit-datagrid-feature-walkthrough.aspx
http://wpf.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Tips & Tricks
http://www.wpftutorial.net/DataGrid.html

jQuery

http://jquery.com/
Javascript library that makes all the things you never wanted to have to do in Javascript that much easier.  Visual Studio 2010 has Intellisense support for it, though it lags slightly behind the latest version.

jQuery Keypad

http://keith-wood.name/keypad.html
I needed an on screen keypad (for use on the iPad) and found this quite handy.

 

Visual StuDIO 2010 – SLOW STARTUP ISSUES SOLVED

I’ve used Visual Studio 2010 for my latest project and was quite happy with it, despite the loss of ViEmu at the time.  ViEmu is now available as a Beta so I may start using it again.

The only major issue I’d had was a slow startup time of well over 30 seconds.  I’ve recently spent some time to track down the cause after noting that an install on another PC, with VisualHG installed, had a warm startup time of just 3 seconds. 

What I found is that the slowdown was related to addins/extensions and the MRU list (as described in this blog entry).  Once I’d cleaned out the MRU list and disabled the offenders it now starts in 8 seconds.

The main culprits seemed to be CopyAsHtml and, to a lesser extent, Keymaps for Resharper (a Resharper plugin).

In terms of addins/extensions Resharper, GhostDoc, and VisualHG are working fine.  ViEmu is now available as a Beta so I might start using it again soon.  More info on .

I used the PowerCommands addin, installed via the Gallery within in Visual Studio 2010, to clear out the MRU lists and grabbed the Regex Editor while I was at it.

 

Remote Desktop on Windows 7 Home Premium

Finally I should mention that I found it handy to have Remote Desktop support on Windows 7 Home Premium.  It’s not perfect (no audio support) but it’s quite useful.  If you want to do this for yourself just run this app as administrator.  It also lets you enable concurrent logons, though I chose not to.  The usual disclaimer of, it worked for me use at your own risk, applies.  :)