A recent exposure to an old IDE that was as almost as responsive as notepad, and the answers I got about it , got me thinking - Visual Studio must really have a lot more stuff that I never use than I thought. It can't all come for free. So I tried to make a list of things I never use in my Visual Studio: Built-in source control Team explorer, ServerExplorer, Architecture Explorer, UML model explorer Tasks List, Start Page Built-in web browser Publishing options, MSI maker Team Foundation Server integration All of the database tools - server explorer, schema editor, database sources, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Connect to database/connect to server. Etc. Tools: Error Lookup, ATL/MFC trace tool, Spy++, WCF config editor The entire Architecture menu. Diagrams, dependency graphs. All unused. The entire Test menu. MSTests are just not used here. And yet, my add-in manager lists zero add-ins, and my extension manager lists one extension (color theme editor). I have read recently that Visual Studio 2010 is essentially all extensions. And I believe that. After all 80% of the things I listed above are absent from the Express edition. It must be possible to rid my Ultimate edition of them too somehow... right? It might even look like I don't use any Visual Studio from this list, but just to clear this up, I would not use another IDE that doesn't have a similarly good editor, debugger, intellisense, profiler, debugger, code navigation tools, refactoring, and did I mention debugger with all of its really handy windows yet?

Reputation: 61512

How to trim down Visual Studio to make it faster?

A recent exposure to an old IDE that was as almost as responsive as notepad, and the answers I got about it, got me thinking - Visual Studio must really have a lot more stuff that I never use than I thought. It can't all come for free.

So I tried to make a list of things I never use in my Visual Studio:

Built-in source control
Team explorer, ServerExplorer, Architecture Explorer, UML model explorer
Tasks List, Start Page
Built-in web browser
Publishing options, MSI maker
Team Foundation Server integration
All of the database tools - server explorer, schema editor, database sources, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Connect to database/connect to server. Etc.
Tools: Error Lookup, ATL/MFC trace tool, Spy++, WCF config editor
The entire Architecture menu. Diagrams, dependency graphs. All unused.
The entire Test menu. MSTests are just not used here.

And yet, my add-in manager lists zero add-ins, and my extension manager lists one extension (color theme editor).

I have read recently that Visual Studio 2010 is essentially all extensions. And I believe that. After all 80% of the things I listed above are absent from the Express edition. It must be possible to rid my Ultimate edition of them too somehow... right?

_{It might even look like I don't use any Visual Studio from this list, but just to clear this up, I would not use another IDE that doesn't have a similarly good editor, debugger, intellisense, profiler, debugger, code navigation tools, refactoring, and did I mention debugger with all of its really handy windows yet?}

Upvotes: 8

Answers (3)

Mahmoud Hanafy

Reputation: 8228

You might want to consider MonoDevelop for windows

I think it's more customizable than VS

Upvotes: 0

Pete

Reputation: 12583

The only thing I can think of is installing a different edition of VS. You say you have the ultimate edition. You could install the Professional edition instead. It doesn't contain all of that bloated functionality.

Upvotes: 2

dukeofgaming

Reputation: 3198

Seems to me you really are looking for another IDE, and that depents on what .NET language you are using. For C#, SharpDevelop comes to mind: http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/

OTOH, you could even boil it down to Notepad++ and compile through the command line. Notepad++ has code completion, but haven't tested it for all languages.

Upvotes: 3

How to trim down Visual Studio to make it faster?

Answers (3)

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