Slow performance may have triggered Visual Studio 2010 delay

A delay of what Microsoft Developer SVP S. Somasegar calls "back a few weeks," in the final release of Visual Studio 2010 and its accompanying .NET Framework 4, is the apparent result of performance issues that beta testers would not let rest.

Somasegar's post yesterday afternoon started out by saying, certainly you've noticed how VS 2010 Beta 2 is faster than Beta 1: "As you may have seen, we significantly improved performance between Beta 1 and Beta 2." But then he transitions smoothly into an admission of just the opposite: "Based on what we've heard, we clearly needed to do more work. Over the last couple of months, our engineering team has been doing a push to improve performance. We have made significant progress in this space since Beta 2."

A Microsoft spokesperson declined to go into specifics this morning about the dates. Since the company was foggy to begin with about release times (up until yesterday, we were being told "Q1 2010"), a delay with a smaller frame of granularity than the release window could probably be interpreted as the next quarter ("Q2 2010") -- a shift which Microsoft would not deny today.
In the meantime, there will be another "checkpoint release" added to the schedule, prior to the Release candidate. When one does the math, Q2 looks more and more likely.

The cause of the delay itself, as Somasegar described it, was apparent virtual memory problems reported by testers. A check of the forum for VS 2010 testers does not specifically mention virtual memory, although many may not have the equipment or experience to diagnose a problem they encounter as VM-related right away.

What they have been reporting is slow performance, and that is probably the VM problem. Developers reported noticeable delays in the IDE: simple things like scrolling problems, delays between typed characters, and IntelliSense popups (suggested completions of keywords with proper syntax, for example) that take whole seconds to be displayed.

Such problems have been consistently reported since last September -- actually during the Beta 1 period. Not all appear to be virtual memory related -- one tester noted performance improvements after changing out Intel video drivers, which a senior Microsoft developer discovered was causing difficulty with Windows Presentation Foundation's hardware acceleration. VS 2010's IDE has been migrated to WPF from the older GDI libraries dating back to Windows 95.

Many testers had been reporting general performance issues under "Suggestions" and not "Bugs," evidently because they've been unable to detect any specific issues -- other than architectural ones -- that could be suspects for the cause. But up until yesterday, Microsoft had been closing those issues as "Resolved as Not Reproducible." Support personnel repeated their boilerplate responses to have testers run diagnostic tools for reporting the circumstances that led to the issues they were having.

But testers responded by saying Beta 2's sloth was across the board, not just one reproducible element. "Sorry to be negative guys, but if anything, 2010B2 seems worse than B1," wrote contributor James 12345 in mid-November. "Build times are always painfully slow bordering on unusable with a modest WPF solution (reminds me of developing in the '80s, I don't think that comment in a product review will make MS marketing folk happy), and there are occasional stability issues. Occasional glitches can be forgiven with WPF controls ghosting in foreground (hovering outside VS or WPF app above all other windows, I have to log out to clear these)...This isn't a viable platform for prime time."

James and others waited for Microsoft to respond, saying nothing in the interim. Microsoft personnel did respond last week...by closing the thread due to what it described as inactivity: "Given that we have not heard from you in 2.5 weeks, we are closing this bug due to inactivity...We have made a variety of performance fixes since Beta 2, so you should see a better experience in VS 2010 RTM...If you have further questions or comments about this or any other issues in VS 2010, please don't hesitate to post again here and we'll be happy to help."

If the RTM delay truly is only a few weeks, as Somasegar suggested, then it's notable that those few weeks could have been scheduled a few weeks ago -- during those weeks that support personnel were meeting testers' complaints with silence.