If you launch Visual Studio with `devenv.exe /safemode` which "prevents all third-party VSPackages from loading when Visual Studio starts" [1] you will find Visual Studio runs extremely quickly. It's stuff like ReSharper that slows it down.

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241278.aspx

Actually, the most monstrous pig in Visual Studio for me is SSDT (Microsoft's SQL-code development environment within VS). That's a bit offtopic since it's for SQL development and not C#, and they made a little bit of improvement in 2015, but still: it's a pathetic monster.

In general, anything that tries to pop-open a GUI and just drags makes me roll my eyes. EDMX files, I'm looking in your direction.

SSDT is insanely slow rebuilding our database model in the 'background'. And it's clearly tripping over itself somewhere because system CPU and IO is typically near zero while these rebuilds are running. Very annoying.

VS2015 improved SSDT builds, I think. Build times were cut in half, but memory usage skyrocketed. I'm supporting a legacy system that used to be north of an hour to build under SSDT. Now it seems closer to 20 minutes, if it doesn't get "Out of Memory".

I do think it maxes out 1 CPU, it's just single-threaded.

This is not necessarily true, especially with VS2015 RTM (Update 1 is a bit better): https://twitter.com/hmemcpy/status/687257223081377792

> This is not necessarily true

Can you please clarify which part? The linked tweet talks about Roslyn. I'd expect that to be loaded because ... it's not third-party.

Yes Roslyn is first party and it naturally does load, and it's very memory-intensive. You can see it happening without any extensions installed.

Memory usage and performance are two things, though. ReSharper may not add much to the memory load, but the IDE still feels sluggish.

I think the reason most people don't notice this is because developers on average have better computer hardware. Anyone who uses a laptop for on-the-go development on the other hand gets hit with these problems front-on.

In college, I assumed everyone loved Visual Studios just because everyone was told to use it and there were, in reality, no other options. I hope that in the next few years, with the open sourcing of some Microsoft software, that we can see better IDEs for the ecosystem being created.

Any IDE that wants to challenge VS has an uphill battle in what concerns:

- GUI editors

- Parallel code debugging

- GPU debugging

- Enterprise code navigation

- Edit-and-continue

- Debugging native code generated for .NET applications

- Mixed language debugging

- GUI Profiler

- Code Profiler

Just a few items on the top of my head.

I made a raytracer the other day (A necessary rite of passage for any developer) and happened to add a Wavefront (.obj) 3D mesh file file to my solution. Then clicked it. VS just shat out what was essentially a mesh viewer with some pretty advanced capabilities. No wonder it's huge :D

And all that stuff would be fine if opening up the file didn't lock up the whole IDE. Lock the tab with a loading anim and let the developer work elsewhere.

Don't forget the image editor.