I’m a relatively new C# developer, and I’m finding myself roughly 1/5th as productive building C# MVC applications in VS 2010 than I was doing it previous in Zend using php by hand using vim.
I work in an iterative cycle of write tests / write code / run tests / integrate & debug problems.
This last step involves building the code using visual studio, debug > attach to process > w3wp.exe and then visiting http://localhost/App/ (localy copy of IIS 7.5) and trigging some event/etc that kicks the VS debugger into running.
Upon finding a bug / issue I then stop the debugger, fix it, recompile and repeat.
This is unbelievably slow.
Compiling the application takes maybe 2 seconds, but the first time loading up in the debugger takes about 60-80 seconds. Turning the debugger off improves the speed of this fractionally, but not significantly.
There is nothing special about my copy of IIS; it’s just configured to run locally serving the project directory from the visual studio project.
My machine isn’t fantastic, its a 3.0Ghz duel core running windows 7 with 4 GB of ram… but this is just beyond a joke. I’m spending more time staring at my screen waiting IIS to do something than I am writing code.
Subsequent page loads are obviously really quick, you know instant page loads.
The issue, I guess, is that IIS needs to run application startup and load files and do whatever it does with the application pool worker when I recompile, which means the initial startup is slow (IOC, web config files, etc).
…and yet, I can’t seem to find many other people on the net complaining about this, so I guess it must be some combination of how the application is configured, how IIS is configured and my workflow which are messed up.
What am I doing wrong?
If there’s no way around IIS startup, how should I be doing development to avoid this problem?
I think most people use the Built In Visual Studio Development Server (IIS-like). If you are running SP1 you can also use IIS Express which is more robust for larger and/or multi/cross website applications.
Right Click on your Web Application -> Properties -> Web Tab to select a Debug Server.