I’m trying to run VS 2010 in an XP VM on my Win 7 Pro development box.
It basically works, but when actually editing code in this environment, my ability to edit constantly stops & stutters for longish periods of time – say 20 seconds of pause for every 50 seconds of functioning environment.
This PC has no difficulties running VS 2010 normally, and I’m not running anything under the main Win 7 OS that is memory or CPU or HDD intensive. There is nothing running on the VM that would explain these pauses either.
What I can see are:
1) the HDD indicator is lit a lot of the time.
2) on the VSS status bar, there is an icon of a file (usual white paper icon) with two yellow plus (+) symbols on it – very similar to the compilation animation.
I have to assume that #2 is the intellisense attempting to compile the code base in the background as I’m using the environment… but it doesn’t cause pauses when I do development on my main OS (non-VM environment). And it never seems to end… this symbol goes for a long time, then I can type for a few moments, then it comes back forever.
At this point, VS2010 is pretty useless in this VM as an editor.
I’ve tried to disable the intellisense from the Options dialog according MS’s instructions:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ecfczya1.aspx
But that seemed to make no difference, making me wonder WT?
Any ideas???
The ++ is Intellisense.
The issue I was running into was the disk speed. It’s incredibly disk I/O intensive, so you need to do everything you can to make the VM’s disk I/O responsive, or turn off Intellisense (e.g. make sure the virtual disk is local, on a speedy drive (ssd!), maybe use a real drive instead of a virtual drive, etc.)