1) I didn't like to speed slow down. I did ask if VS2008 improved it and
got stone silence on that.
Yes, there is an improvement. Although it is quite subjective when you
talk about GUI speed. For instance, I still cannot compete with my machine
when I type text or move windows. It consumes the input much faster than I
could ever produce.
Two major pet peeves regarding new VS IDE since VS 7.0/7.1 are debugger
slow down and intellisense resource hog. VS2008 debugging is still
relatively slow. I don't think any modern IDE can achieve VC60 debugging
speed. However, new multicore CPU's definitely help. With every hardware
upgrade VS IDE becomes a bit faster. Also, I succeeded to get rid of nasty
habit to press F10 for several seconds during debug session until a couple
of hundreds of lines are passed over. Now I place the caret where I want
to stop and press Ctrl+F10.
Intellisense has been improveed, too. Now it takes less time from opening
a big project to fully working IDE with intellisense up tp date. Also,
opening for the first time the combo that contains the function list in
text editor window doesn't take 30 seconds anymore. There are many minor
improvements as well.
The big advantage of VS2008 is TR1 extension to the C++ standard library.
Also, there is major extension to the MFC library, however the projects
I'm working on don't use MFC, so it is less important for me right now.
Alex