Is Visual Studio written in Windows Forms?

visual-studio, winforms

Solution

This isn't quite a fair question. :)

Visual Studio .NET (devenv.exe) is not written directly in WinForms, as it is not a CLR executable. (My hunch is that it is still produced with Visual C++.) I know for fact that neither 2005 nor 2008 versions of devenv.exe carry a CLR header. (I just dropped them both on ILDASM; they're definitely not managed code.)

That said, just because devenv.exe isn't written in WinForms doesn't mean WinForms is too slow for an editor. WinForms isn't, on most systems, too slow at all -- our app code will be the bottleneck before the framework is.

My hunch is that devenv.exe is written in C/C++ due to it being an upgrade of a long-standing environment; the cost to Microsoft to rewrite it in .NET is undoubtedly prohibitive.

Again, as far as WinForms speed is concerned -- there are quite a few WinForms apps which have no performance issues whatsoever, including a fairly robust .NET IDE (SharpDevelop).

Problem

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