I believe that better tools lead to better results. That’s why I care about my tools performance a lot!

Recently I had a conversation with Peter Kirchner and Kay Giza on how to speed up Visual Studio. Specifically by configuring you Anti-Virus software. But beside that there are loads of things that you can do.

So I decided to share the tweaks on environment:

Visual Studio 2008 Options

Disable “Animate environment tools”…

Disable “Track Changes”…

Disable “Cider” – the WPF designer in VS 2008 …

Visual Studio 2010

Disable the WPF designer in VS 2010…

Disable “Track Active Item in Solution Explorer”…

Start with empty environment/disable start page…

Disable “Enable rich client visual experience”…

Enable “Only build startup projects and dependencies on Run”…

Disable intellitrace…

Anti-Virus

Exclude the GAC and Visual Studio related directories from you virus scanner…

Exclude the devenv.exe from your virus scanner…

Windows Search

Ensure your projects directory is not indexed…

64 Bit support

Patch the devenv.exe to support 2+ GB memory…

Force Visual Studio to NOT swap data into the paging file: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/2cfd12ae-f070-4182-9211-23d11aeecc35

Windows XP?

And if you are not running Windows 7 yet: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/981741

Misc

Finally: The less Add-Ins, Visualizers, Snippets, Templates etc. you have installed the faster will be Visual Studio. On the other side are these things really helpful and increase your productivity. So you got to find a way in the middle…