To help explain what we changed to improve toolbox performance, it may help to first describe how the toolbox works. This meant it would not just be a simple matter of refactoring a single class or tuning some main routines within the toolbox, we also needed to tune the individual designers themselves. The implementation of the designers impacted the Toolbox’s performance.Larger solutions seemed to show more potential for improvement.The impact could vary in subtle ways depending on which designer was in use.For example, with a large solution we observed that Toolbox was blocking the Visual Studio UI by 30 seconds when we closed the solution. Scenarios seemingly unrelated to interacting with the toolbox were being impacted by the logic used to refresh the toolbox.

We learned several things analyzing the performance traces: We profiled these scenarios using solutions provided by customers as well as ones we created to simulate large, complex solutions. Armed with this data we designed several test scenarios. The Toolbox is one of the features that generated a lot of hits. In previous blog posts on performance we mentioned PerfWaston. In today’s blog post, we will discuss one of the features, the toolbox, and the performance enhancements we have made. In Visual Studio 2012, we wanted to improve this experience. As features have become more versatile, and solutions have grown in size and complexity, we’ve seen that the additional workload can cause the UI to become slow to respond, repaint, or even hang. Producing Intellisense, red squiggles, smart rename, refactoring, etc. Sometimes getting all of these great features comes at a price. Visual Studio is packed with awesome rapid application development features. I would like to introduce Duke Kamstra and Chuck England from two teams in Visual Studio to describe to you the work done to improve responsiveness via the Toolbox. As mentioned in the previous performance post on Typing and Editing we would follow with a post on the improvements to Visual Studio 2012 from enhancements in the Toolbox.

Ms visual studio responsive design