Microsoft has released Visual Studio 15 Preview 5 for developers. The latest update brings major improvements to performance and memory efficiency. To achieve faster performance, company made changes to lightweight project load and on-demand loading of extensions.
Key performance gains in Visual Studio 15 Preview 5:
- Shorter solution load time with lightweight project load: Working on solutions that contain upwards of 100 projects doesn’t mean you need to work with all the files or projects at a given time. VS “15” provides editing and debugging functionality without waiting for Visual Studio to load every project. You can try out this capability with managed projects in Preview 5 by turning on “Lightweight Solution Load” from Tools -> Options -> Projects and Solutions.
- Faster startup with on-demand loading of extensions: The idea is simple: load extensions when they’re needed, rather than when VS starts. The Preview 5 moved the Python and Xamarin extensions to load on demand and are working on moving all extensions we ship with Visual Studio and extensions shipped by third party extension vendors to this model.
- Moving subsystems from the main VS process to separatel processes: The Preview 5 moved some memory-intensive tasks such as Git Source Control, and JavaScript and TypeScript language services to separate processes. This makes it less likely for you to experience delays caused by code running in the main Visual Studio process, or Visual Studio becoming sluggish and even crashing as the main process approaches the 4GB memory limit of 32-bit processes.
- Faster project load, coding, and debugging for C++: The Preview 5 have made loading C++ projects faster. You can enable this by setting “Enable Faster Project Load” to True from Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> C/C++ -> Experimental. The new improvements to linker and PDB loading libraries to make incremental builds and launching the debugger much faster while significantly reducing memory consumption while debugging.
- Improved speed of Git source control operations by using git.exe: New improved debugging performance by optimizing initialization and other costs related to IntelliTrace and the Diagnostic Tools window, and removed several delays that occur when editing and switching between XAML files.
