Correcting Visual Studio 2008 Text Editors Sluggish Performance

Since move from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008 I’ve noticed a performance hit when using the text editor. Specifically a “sluggishness” while typing. Heading over to Microsoft for a solution I found that I was not alone in observing this problem, and that the issue itself could be a lot worse. At it’s worst a developer could write a line of code and have to wait 2-3 seconds before the line would appear within the editor. My experience wasn’t nearly this bad, but it was still bad enough to interrupt my work flow.

The biggest culprit for this performance decrease turned out to be using the text editor’s design or split mode. I knew this wasn’t my issue as I’m not a fan of the split mode or the design mode and don’t use them. 99% of my time within Visual Studio is spent using the text editor strictly in the code view, so I kept looking for a solution. The one I found was pretty simple. I ended up turning off the navigation bar within the text editor and haven’t had the problem since. This isn’t an optimal solution, and wouldn’t work for every developer, as the navigation bar has a purpose in watching elements being created, for assigning handlers accordingly, but for me it’s a feature worth trading for the performance boost.

To turn the navigation bar off select Tools – > Options.. Then from the option dialog box, select Text Editor and then All Languages It should be noted that you can turn off the navigation bar for only certain languages. I had no need to delegate the functionality so I chose to turn it off across the board. Finally un-check the Navigation Bar check box and click ok. The navigation bar should be gone along with your performance woes.