Last month, Microsoft released an update for Visual Studio 2022 version 17.10 for Windows. The new release (version 17.10.2) contains multiple performance enhancements, such as quicker loading for Windows Forms designer and .NET solutions, faster Razor/C# colorization, and reduced DLL overhead in specific scenarios.
The loading speed for the Windows Forms designer in projects targeting .NET Core 3.1 and up was increased as a result of feedback from different developers and partners. According to Microsoft, by optimizing how the assemblies are prioritized and loaded, the designer restart time was improved between 30% and 50% in a typical line of business application. Similarly, the loading time for .NET solutions was optimized by reducing the evaluation cache size. Microsoft reports that measurements with OrchardCore solution showed that the cache size dropped by nearly 50%, while the time to open the same solution was reduced in 10%.
Another improvement in this release was the C# code colorization speed in Razor. Code colorization is a task performed by the C# language service (Roslyn). While this process is usually fast, Microsoft states that in approximately 10% of the cases this process can run into hundreds of milliseconds. In order to solve this issue, Roslyn was optimized accordingly - which, according to Microsoft, resulted in approximately 25% reduction in colorization time in the slowest cases.
Other performance improvements in this release were related to CPU and memory usage. In particular, the number of DLLs loaded in specific scenarios was cut down by 10%, with a positive impact on project loading time. The exact numbers related to this improvement, however, were not provided by Microsoft.
The new release, however, introduced a few bugs - such as problems when using extensions. In order to solve these bugs (and others introduced since the initial 17.10 release), one week later Microsoft released version 17.10.3. The details on the problems solved by this release can be found here. While there aren't any new features in this version, updating to the latest version is advised since some of the fixes are considerably important.
The latest version of Visual Studio 2022 for Windows can be downloaded here. The second preview of Visual Studio 2022 version 17.11 was also released with v17.10.2. The next Visual Studio version will focus on quality-of-life enhancements for all developers and workloads, and it can be downloaded here.