Visual Studio -- working on performance

Jason has a new posting on the progress of Visual Studio and I wanted to chime in myself. Some people have been wondering what I’ve been up to… I think you’ll be happy to hear that about 2 months ago I put down a bunch of my long term planning responsibilities so that I could work on Visual Studio performance directly. Woo hoo!

So performance work: what kind of work? Well the most important thing I’ve been doing is helping people in VS to understand where the problems are, and how to make directed improvements that get locked in. I’ve been doing lots of training, I’ve been creating custom analysis tools for studying VS performance problems, and I’ve also been yelling at a lot of people and just generally making all kinds of friends in my division. :)

During these last weeks we’ve made a lot of progress, I’m sure you’re going to feel the product is a lot snappier than the builds we provided at the PDC. But of course I’m never satisfied – there are even more wins coming later. I worked with many different teams to help us with our startup, with UI transitions, with memory usage, with threading issues – especially with how WPF and our main thread synchronize. This very morning I’m busy reviewing goals for every major group in Visual Studio and we’re working hard to create a great experience. I’m especially happy with the changes that will benefit many applications (like some of the ones that are finding their way into WPF, or interop)

So, especially for the next big push before release, performance will be a very high priority for Visual Studio – I’m going to be very pleasantly busy.

What does this all mean to you? My blog is now a great place to give your feedback, especially on the Beta when it comes out. Tell me what is hurting you the most, many people will be watching, including me, and we still have time to get attention on key problems. I'd love to hear about it.