I love adding drama to my life, which is why for *this* DevTeach, I decided at the last minute (with permission) to change one of my EF talks to What's New in EF4 and also to use VS2010/EF4 for my other talk and my workshop.
I have been using VS2010 Beta 1 at home on a VPC that is hooked up to an X64 machine with plenty of RAM. But the VPC was killing me when hooked up to my travel laptop which is X86 and only has a total of 4GB, which translates to only 3GB.
I thought I had done someting wrong. VS was taking forEVer to start up and forEVer and a day to load up projects. I finally discovered that if I pre-loaded VS2010 and pre-loaded any project then I could just open and close solutions with ease.
That's how I presented my EF4 session, until VS2010 locked up and I could no longer open it up without restarting my VPC.
After the session, I talked with Etienne Tremblay who patted me on the back and said, "No it's not you. It's the piggy VS2010". He quoted the same exact amount of time I had found with my many tests - 40 seconds to open up Visual Studio and many mintues to open a project.
Etienne, who I trust implicitly when it comes to all things VS and my hardware, suggested I just install the beta directly onto my laptop which I did with his help. He got me started because I wanted to be assured that my laptop wouldn't die a miserable death of lose it's VS2008 capabilities if I did so.
*caveat* This is my presentation machine, not my daily computer. I plan to repave it when Win7 comes out and don't mind putting a Beta on it. Be thoughtful about installing Beta software on metal. :-) *
Now the IDE opens up instantly and if I open a project or solution from within the IDE it is very fast.
If I attempt to open a solution from Windows Explorer, it's back to waiting and waiting and waiting and in my case, eventually just ending the process.
So installing on metal was the right way to go. I never have luck with VPCs at conferences. Someday I'l relate the various nightmares I have had each time I have attempted to do so.
