A recent exposure to an old IDE that was as almost as responsive as notepad, and the answers I got about it, got me thinking – Visual Studio must really have a lot more stuff that I never use than I thought. It can’t all come for free.
So I tried to make a list of things I never use in my Visual Studio:
- Built-in source control
- Team explorer, ServerExplorer, Architecture Explorer, UML model explorer
- Tasks List, Start Page
- Built-in web browser
- Publishing options, MSI maker
- Team Foundation Server integration
- All of the database tools – server explorer, schema editor, database sources, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Connect to database/connect to server. Etc.
- Tools: Error Lookup, ATL/MFC trace tool, Spy++, WCF config editor
- The entire Architecture menu. Diagrams, dependency graphs. All unused.
- The entire Test menu. MSTests are just not used here.
And yet, my add-in manager lists zero add-ins, and my extension manager lists one extension (color theme editor).
I have read recently that Visual Studio 2010 is essentially all extensions. And I believe that. After all 80% of the things I listed above are absent from the Express edition. It must be possible to rid my Ultimate edition of them too somehow… right?
It might even look like I don’t use any Visual Studio from this list, but just to clear this up, I would not use another IDE that doesn’t have a similarly good editor, debugger, intellisense, profiler, debugger, code navigation tools, refactoring, and did I mention debugger with all of its really handy windows yet?
The only thing I can think of is installing a different edition of VS. You say you have the ultimate edition. You could install the Professional edition instead. It doesn’t contain all of that bloated functionality.