Visual Studio 2012 winform designer is VERY slow
.net, c++-cli, visual-studio-2012, windows-forms-designer, winforms
Solution
Ok, so this question has been open for over a year now and nobody has managed to come up with a concrete answer as to why the winform designer was so slow.
I recently went back to VS2012 and updated to Update 3. Despite pouring over various release notes, I didn't see any mention of performance increases in this area but I'm happy to report that the designer is now much, much faster.
Just to muddy the waters somewhat, my development machine has been upgraded since I originally posted this, I now sport an AMD FX-8350 CPU, 16GB of RAM and an SSD. When I first got this new machine, the first thing I tried was VS2012 and I found that it was just as slow as before. Now it's capable of loading the same form that used to take 6mins+ in about 15s. This is still nearly twice as long as on VS2008, but I can live with that as it's a huge leap from 360s+. I only mention this as I cannot be sure if there has been a bug fixed in the designer, or just performance improvements - perhaps making use of extra processor cores. In other words, your mileage may vary but if you haven't tried it already, try installing Update 3.
You can download Update 3 here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39305
Problem
We've recently migrated one of our Winforms projects to Visual Studio 2012 from Visual Studio 2008. The transition has went remarkably smoothly and everything builds just fine, however we're now struggling with the winforms designer, which is running incredibly slow. To give an example, if we open a small form (the form contains two text boxes, a numeric updown and two buttons - all standard built-in controls, nothing 3rd party), it will take approximately 40-45 seconds in 2012, however on 2008 it would open in 1 or 2 seconds. For our larger forms, this difference is much more pronounced. In 2008, it would take about 7 seconds to open the form but in 2012 its taking over 6 minutes. The worst part is that this is a blocking action, VS2012 is almost completely unresponsive while opening the forms. This also happens just by clicking on the .h of a form, so it's not like we can easily avoid it just by sticking to the code itself. Has anyone else experienced this? Does anyone know why it's happening and if there's anything that can be done about it? Additional information: Our application is a C++/CLI winforms app. The behaviour is seen on all of our development machines, which run Windows 7 x64. My machine is a Core i7 860 CPU with 12Gb of RAM (over 60% free right now while I was benchmarking the above) - more than enough, I would think. In any case, my system is by no means running slow, it's just the VS2012 designer. EDIT: Just for extra clarification, we haven't installed ANY addons or anything like that. This is a virgin VS2012 install. EDIT2: It doesn't seem to be a network thing, either.