Though the performance improvements blog highlighted work the Visual C++ team had done around file-level parallel builds and incremental builds for mixed native-managed projects, there are other things in for VC++ in VS 2008 that I thought would be worth mentioning. So, here we go:
· Editor responsiveness – Updating IntelliSense, displaying the QuickInfo tooltip and processing AutoComplete requests won’t degrade editor experience.
· Goto Definition improvements – Significant reduction in the time required to “Goto Definition”. One customer reported that a 2 minute delay dropped to 10-20 seconds.
· Load solution performance – Load time of large Visual C++ solutions is much better. Some customers are reporting speed ups of 25%-70%.
· File lookup in projects – Provides improvements to several scenarios such as adding files to projects, changing configurations, etc.
· Changing configuration options – Modifying options, such as adding an include directory or changing the active configuration, are much faster for large solutions.
· Reduced CPU consumption – We now process low-priority background items (such as IntelliSense population) using 20% less CPU time.
I do hope that all this work will provide a much enhanced IDE experience for C++ developers. The Visual C++ team is already hard at work on the next major version of Visual C++ and is hoping to address even more performance and scalability issues in the future. Also, for those of you working on Visual C++ 2005, the team will be releasing a patch that applies the fixes described above to that version as well.