UPDATE:  The hotfix has been release.

I’m a big fan of Visual Studio 2008. There are a lot of updates and features that just make it better than any of the previous versions. But, unfortunately, it looks like Microsoft made some kind of mistake in between Beta and RTM. The RTM version introduced performance problems when working with ASP.NET applications. The three main issues are:

• The HTML editor will freeze up all the time. Type a word and then have the editor freeze up on. The problem gets worse the bigger the HTML source is. I have a couple of pages in my application at work that is painful to make simple changes to.
• Solution compiling takes forever. I can easily takes between three and five minutes from the time I click the F5 button and get the web page up. And then, because I have turned off the batch compile so the compile will be quicker, going to pages within the application can be painfully slow.
• When in the HTML editor for an ASPX page, the context menu does not always display the View Code option. I use that menu item a lot throughout the day; when the editor doesn’t give me the option I have to move the mouse to the Solution Explorer, waiting for the panel to expand (I keep most panels collapsed), locating the file I’m working on, and then right clicking on that file to get to the View Code option. The time and effort to do that adds up during the day.

I worked on trying to figure out how to correct these problems for a long time. I had my machine reimaged (sometimes with Microsoft Betas, the only way to truly clean up is to format the hard drive) with no luck.

Well, the good news is that Microsoft has acknowledged the problems and has a hot fix done in the works. From what I have been able to find out so far, the following items are corrected:

• Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with custom control that expose long list of properties.
• Typing in Design view is slow
• Quotes are not inserted after Class or CssClass attribute even when the option is enabled.
• Visual Studio crashes when ServiceReference element points to the current web page
• When opening script file, colorization is not available for a few seconds
• Jscript intellisense broken if an empty string property is encountered
• Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files.

I heard from Mikhail Arkhipov on 1/28/2008 that the hot fix had completed its private testing (I was actually trying to get involved with the private testing) and that the fix was just waiting to be officially built, signed, and published. Then I noticed Scott Guthrie commented a couple of days later that the hot fix will be available for public download next week (this week).

I’ve been checking the Microsoft Connect site and ASP.NET a couple of times a day and I’ll post an update as soon as I see the hot fix released.