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Asked: 2026-05-16T01:05:15+00:00

What the crap is this Preparing Solution dialog that VS 2010 shows when I

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What the crap is this “Preparing Solution” dialog that VS 2010 shows when I open solutions? Does this show up for everyone or is something screwed up on my install?

Anyone know what its actually doing?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Here’s the official history, from Cameron McColl:

    In Dev10 we invested in improving solution load time by looking at making the load asynchronous. Unfortunately due to time constraints this work didn’t make it into Dev10 so instead we decided to at least make the user experience slightly better by giving the user feedback on what was going on during solution load. Initially this involved a dialog that presented accurate feedback on how many projects were being loaded along with the name of the currently loading project. Early testing of this experience revealed that there was often a non-trivial delay (i.e. the spinning donut and “not responding” window title) after the projects were loaded and the existence of the dialog made this delay very apparent once the dialog was dismissed. So what is the delay? There are 2 main things going on after the solution projects have been loaded. First all previously loaded documents/editors are reopened and for some designer files this can take a few seconds. Secondly and usually much worse we call NotifyOnAfterSolutionOpen which is an extension point in VS. Any subscriber to this event gets to run their code at this point and quite often this code is very expensive. For Dev10 we didn’t have the time to go improve the perf of all of these subscribers and so it was felt that a second dialog was required to make it clear that the Solution Load was still underway. What really sucks about the second dialog is that it doesn’t tell you what part of the code is causing the delay and worse the progress control is the marquee style which means it’s non determinant (unlike the first dialog).

    Moving forward we are continuing to investigate ways to make solution load truly asynchronous and as such never show such nasty dialogs.
    In the dialog’s defense, our research indicates that most people prefer a modal status dialog over the spinning donut or unresponsive UI. Of course, everyone prefers no delay at all, and we’re working on that for Dev11.

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