I’ve used Visual Studio since 2005 and although it always felt overkill for the stuff I do, it always worked and performed just fine for me even though I’ve always only had mid range machines at best. Never felt like I had to stop using it.
Since VS2019 things started to change. Started getting more bugs requiring restarts and things started to get slower. It is still OK and I do still use vs2019 at work everyday on a AMD 2600x. We will be ditching it soon though…
However… vs2022 is just completely unusable now. In the video below you can see how it stutters when scrolling and everything you do in vs2022 stutters like this. You can imagine how frustrating this is while typing. It’s just not something you can use to work in. All through my Devember project I’ve been trying to figure what the issue may be and if turning certain things off or on will help, but nothing did. It’s just garbage now.
I did try and google this issue and I’ve only found other people with similar issues and no solutions… apart from switching to VSCode.
I know, I know… I should have switch to VSCode long ago. Well, now I don’t have much of a choice. For now I will use VSCode on Windows, but I then want to start looking at also switching to Linux.
Below you can see that vs2019 has higher CPU usage, but it’s smooth while vs2022 has less CPU usage but stutters and lags worst than Star Citizen or the latest Escape from Tarkov wipe…
This is a Win10 VM which is why the CPU speed isn’t changing, but I did test this on the machine it self when it first started to stutter like this and it did the exact same thing.
Interesting, I just tested that out on a pos Lenovo laptop with a class with 2,000 lines of code and like 40 methods in it - don’t @ me.
I have 4 cores and 8 logical processors.
Sure there was a bit of a spike as the machine picked up the information, and there is stuttering, if I yank the page down, it stops and then jumps to the position I have yanked it to.
I am not sure I would call that behaviour an issue though, I mean, if you are yanking it down - you kind of want it to skip and not scroll through everything right?
Have you changed any base settings? I note your colouration is slightly different to mine, but not sure if that is just a basic setting or you have some sort of nuget for it.
I have some extensions in vs2019, but vs2022 has nothing. I just set it to dark mode.
The dragging is just the easiest way to show the issue, but even typing has the same stuttering affect. Or if I scroll the file by moving the cursor down past the bottom it will also stutter. Intellisense also struggles and I have to wait like a few seconds sometimes before it will show or update.
It didn’t do this when I first installed 2022, it started later… after an update I assume. It’s not something I use everyday since at work we still only vs2019, so I’m not 100% sure when it started.
And obviously it doesn’t affect everyone, but it’s not due to a lack of horsepower.
O well… I’ve spent too much time on this and I don’t think it’s really worth trying to fix it anymore. Time for a change.
Unfortunately, I think this is systemic to the VS team at microsoft.
If you have some time to spare, this video shows quite a few of these performance and productivity issues:
I find it quite amusing that they broke basic functionality just to have something to justify their jobs.
I see similar issues with our EAP software too. It basically just processes text and shows database entries. The fucking “aged like warm milk Delphi predecessor” was a on warp speed compared to the current version - which requires 3D acceleration for displaying mostly static text in static fields. I used to fly through console applications which showed more information and ran on a potato from the last millennium. /rantover Sorry OP, that I didn’t add anything to solve your actual problem.
On the topic of IDEs, I think rants are almost always allowed.
Jetbrains Rider seems like a decent alternative also. I still feel like a noob on .net sometimes even though I’ve been mostly a .net developer for the past few years, so take that for what it’s worth.
I only do “light” programming, as in automating recurring tasks at work with small scripts and smaller projects at home.
I like how quickly my about 20 addon loaded Visual Studio Code starts up. And it is the number one thing I expect: Fast and flexible.
Every time I tried some IDE, the pure existance of a start up screen (during which neither the CPU, RAM nor Storage is fully loaded) pisses me the hell of!
Well… I found the issue. At least in my case and at least for my VM. After disabling Hardware Graphics acceleration everything got smooth again.
My first thought was that this actually makes kinda sense since it’s a VM without a physical GPU, but I did see the same issue on bare metal and other people are reporting the same issue on bare metal as well. I don’t have vs2022 installed on bare metal anymore and I don’t want to install there again.
I checked vs2019 and this setting is off there by default. Enabling it results in the same lag/stuttering I get in vs2022.
I wonder if this setting in vs2022 also used to be off by default and then made on by default with an update. I didn’t have this issue when I first started using vs2022 which leads me to believe something was changed with an update and right now it looks like it’s this setting…
I’ve spent a lot of time disabling all sorts of other stuff with zero effect. Most of the posts online are people claiming that the machines are not powerful enough or that it’s extensions or IntilliCode, but no… it’s the one thing that’s suppose to make it work better that’s making it work worse. That’s quite often the Microsoft way though…
EDIT: I should point out that overall vs2022 is slower that vs2019. It’s not massive, but it is noticeable. I tried running my Devember project in VSCode and it compiles and run, but the WebView2 control does seem to work. Still need to figure that one out, but I do want to move a way from Visual Studio 2019/2022.
I started with Borland Delphi, spent a few years trapped in Visual Studio, and then I started using Linux full time as I programmed mostly web and PHP - in those days IDEs did not exist for that, closest was something like Dreamweaver.
When I got back to IDEs, I realised how much they get in your way. Debuggers are nice, sure… But usually leads to severely overdependence and is a crutch that only serves to slow you down. I personally believe debuggers are one big reason why many are still stuck in single threaded land. The idea is nice - you just freeze the application at a specific point and see what exactly is wrong - but debuggers as they existed in 2010 were inherently impossible to use with multithreaded apps, since they tended to freeze one thread and not the others. So, unless the program was crafted for running with independent threads, debugging was a no-go. FUN!
Not to mention that when you use Visual C and it’s ilk, you don’t need to worry about things like libraries and object files. These things are hidden from view and only peeks out once in a blue moon. Which makes many people scratch their head when they get an exception of “The function you called does not exist” despite having added the proper include files…
And features like intellisense can quickly turn into intellisuck when you manage to do something really stupid like declare a function called strcat that takes an std::string argument and adds the word “Cat” to it. Perfectly legitimate and… oh wait why do I have a buffer overrun now???
Don’t get me wrong, IDEs are great in many ways. But they hide much of the complexity when often, you need to know that complexity as a senior programmer.
Which is why I’ve decided to go with an editor instead… And Visual Code with vim bindings is like Emacs only modern and awesome. Not going to look back anytime soon, unless my job requires it…
Not going to look back anytime soon, unless my job requires it…