Rick Strahl's Weblog  

Wind, waves, code and everything in between...
.NET • C# • Markdown • WPF • All Things Web
Contact   •   Articles   •   Products   •   Support   •   Advertise
Sponsored by:
Markdown Monster - The Markdown Editor for Windows

Visual Studio Hotfix for Slow Web Forms Editing and Input Focus Issues


:P
On this page:

Microsoft has just released a hotfix for a number of issues that have been plaguing me for some time in Visual Studio 2008. The issues involved have to do with the visual designer and the HTML code editor and a number of different input focus and slow input situations.

You can get the hotfix from here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2008/02/09/downloadable-hotfix-performance-and-editor-fixes-for-microsoft-visual-studio-2008-and-visual-web-developer-express-2008.aspx

You can read the official fix list at the link above, but here are a few issues that it has addressed for me specifically:

Visual Designer Focus issues

In the the Visual Web Forms designer I would often be unable to select controls inside of container controls or DOM elements. Instead of selecting a contained control the control's container would select and only repeated clicking and selecting de-selecting would eventually get the control focused. The fix now gets selection right in most cases. Also multiple selection is no longer so sketchy. I also had a number of issues with cutting and pasting of controls almost consistently crashing VS - which also seems to be gone now.

Visual Designer and Property Sheet Synching

I had major problems with the property sheet not synching with the selected control. In many situations the sync would simply not work at all or require repeated clicks on the Properties context menu. Now controls select much more quickly and the property sheet synchs properly although there's still a second or so delay, which is annoying but acceptable.

Slow Master Page Loading

I had major issues with master pages loading taking forever when the page loaded for the first time. It would often take 20-30 seconds for the first form to come up. Subsequent forms were much faster, but the first load was horrendous. Now in the same project I was blown away to see that the load was maybe 5-10 seconds with subsequent pages loading nearly instantly.

Performance for loading into the Visual Editor in general is much improved.

Keyboard Input lagging in the HTML Source Editor

On occasion I would have situations where the editor would be up and running and there'd be a cursor, but I'd type into the editor and nothing would happen. I'd have to click off and back into the editor to properly get focus and then it would work. In some cases the keyboard buffer was even locked where any additional keys would bring a white overlay on the editor. Now with the hotfix that problem seems to have disappeared. Also the editor seems a lot more snappy in general.

Mysterious View Code Availability

The patch also fixes the View Code context menu option which prior to the patch was extremely hit or miss. Sometimes the menu option would show up - other times it wouldn't. Apparently a lot of the problems fixed by this patch have to do with idle state detection and some hardware configuration apparently never entered the necessary wait states to update certain VS UI features. Other things that can be affected by this are things like Syntax highlighting taking a while to show up or the member list to populate. All of that too is now working as it should.

 

What's odd is that I *really* didn't notice these problems as acutely until a few weeks ago around the same time Microsoft had put out a pre-release patch. I tried the patch about a week ago and all the above issues disappeared. Some of these fixed issues appear to be side effects of this patch since they're not explicitly mentioned on the fix list, but hey I'm not arguing. This patch has brought some sanity back into my development environment.

The patch has a few additional fixes that you can find on the download page. The fixes will eventually end up in Visual Studio 2008 SP1, but I suspect most people will want to install this hotfix since these issues affect a wide range of the product.

Posted in ASP.NET  Visual Studio  

The Voices of Reason


 

Mike
February 09, 2008

# re: Visual Studio Hotfix for Slow Web Forms Editing and Input Focus Issues

Service Pack 1? With all the new stuff coming, I'm thinking Visual Studio 2009! They never should have let marketing let them push 2008 out now, it would be much better aligned after the releases of Windows and SQL Server later this year. Then they could include MCV as well.

Nate
February 09, 2008

# re: Visual Studio Hotfix for Slow Web Forms Editing and Input Focus Issues

Thanks for the heads up.

Rick Strahl
February 10, 2008

# re: Visual Studio Hotfix for Slow Web Forms Editing and Input Focus Issues

@Mike - while I agree there are a few buggy issues in VS 2008, VS 2008 overall feels a lot more solid than VS 2005 and in a lot of ways it's a big improvement over VS 2005. I for one am glad that VS 2008 is here even with the issues above it generally was better than VS 2005.

VS 2009 will be a long way off (close to 2 years). By the time it ships I'm sure Microsoft will have a whole new set of technologies for you to screw around with <g>. If you go by that logic there would never be a new version of VS...

In the near term there's MVC, Entity Framework and Silverlight all of which will be add-ons, which for new technology is probably a good thing because they can be rev'd much quicker than having to wait for VS.NET release cycles.

Nick T
February 28, 2008

# re: Visual Studio Hotfix for Slow Web Forms Editing and Input Focus Issues

I love 2008, yes it's slow but beautiful. Before the hotifx it was unbearable. If I made a change to a control name, I could literally get coffee before my change trickled down.

After the hot fix the only thing that bites is if I close the element I have to wait about 5 seconds for the multi threading of the form to complete.

I would never, ever go back to archaic 2005. Ever! 2008 is my hotrod!. lol

Samarjit
March 06, 2008

# re:Data-driven ResourceProvider w/ Ajax Resource Admin form

When i run the file with oracle database i got an error
could not load file or assembly wwDataOracle or one of its dependencies.
The system cannot find the file specified.

Jeneby Mathews
April 12, 2008

# re: Visual Studio Hotfix for Slow Web Forms Editing and Input Focus Issues

I had serious issues with Master page performance. This is not listed as a fix but it is indeed as pointed out by rick. This was a truly a "hot" fix. VS appears more stable and I am having fun again

robarahz
April 28, 2008

# re: Visual Studio Hotfix for Slow Web Forms Editing and Input Focus Issues

The hotfix didn't help me, unfortunately. I wait 1, 2, 3 even 4 minutes before VS2008 comes back if I switch to Design view or change a control. My co-worker was over 8 minutes before he killed the session. We upgraded from 2003 and now there's no going back.

How in the world could this get past QA???

Sigh, sorry to vent, but I can't find a fix anywhere.

-robert

linFen
May 05, 2008

# jQuery Intellisense in Visual Studio

JeffKing,who'soneoftheprogrammanagersintheWebToolDivisionandwhofocusesontheJavaScr...

Hank
June 03, 2008

# re: Visual Studio Hotfix for Slow Web Forms Editing and Input Focus Issues

Guys, I am fustrate with VS2008. I do not know why use a lot CPU and the PC is Frezee. The disigner is to slow too. I aplyed the hotfix but still I have problem of performace. I have 2.88 MHz 2.5 gb memory. Some body have any idea how I can improve the performace of VS2008.

Or somebody can tell how I can put this problem in the desk of microsoft developers? I think is ridiculos!! sorry but how is possible that in this point we have this problems!!

Thanks!!
Hank

Cort
January 22, 2009

# re: Visual Studio Hotfix for Slow Web Forms Editing and Input Focus Issues

Here it is Jan 09 and I've gone through the Hotfix and the SP 1 - both of which helped temporarily - and my master pages are still as slow as sludge, it still takes forever for my project to boot up (stuck on master pages) and I'm still stuck staring at the 'not responding' message.

Instead of my CPU usage going to 100% it goes to 80%. I doubled the memory of my computer and it makes no difference.

Josh Sommers
April 08, 2009

# re: Visual Studio Hotfix for Slow Web Forms Editing and Input Focus Issues

Sigh. Me too. The designer is slow as ever. None of the hotfixes or SP1 did anything to help. My designer pages take minutes to open. It takes just as long to change one single property in the designer....make the change...wait three minutes...the designer refreshes.

Plus the designer does all kinds of wacky stuff, like when I am editing one table, the widths of columns and text boxes in another table keep getting wider and wider, and then eventually when I do a manual refresh, they go back to normal size, but as I continue to edit other parts of the page, the tables and other controls will still randomly get wider and wider.

What a sham. I've heard MS isn't even working on fixing VS2008, they are onto VS 2010 now. All I can say is that it had better be a thousand times better than this.

David
May 18, 2009

# re: Visual Studio Hotfix for Slow Web Forms Editing and Input Focus Issues

VS 2008 is a pig. It's this kind of stuff that makes me want to be a PHP developer. The hotfixes and SP1 did help the designer. The build time is still unbearable. I don't know about the rest of you, but I have work to do. I can't afford to wait minutes every time I want see the results of a change I made. This is just stupid. Why did they have to release hotfix and a service pack just to make the crappy software usable. Didn’t they at least try to use their product once before they shipped it out the door. Do they care how much this costs people? No, they just keep tacking on features instead of caring about Quality. It's just as bad with SharePoint. I guess they think, no matter what kind of turds they send out the door, the MS slaves will just gobble them up. I'm getting really sick of this. Now I have to get a $3,000 machine just to be productive. If this doesn't change, I will be an open source developer in another couple of years.

SEO West Palm Beach
May 24, 2010

# SEO West Palm Beach

So I actually did this last minute entry, but I think it came out really well. I just submitted it now, and we’ ll see how that goes! If anything, this is something I can add to my resume for design. (With slideshowpro, the file compressed, so quality isn’ t that great, which in a sense is good) Tags: contest , entry , UCI This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 9: 54 am and is filed under Design , Work. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2. 0 feed. You can...

West Wind  © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005 - 2024