We switched to VS2010 from VS2003 a few months ago, and there are many many impr

Question

We switched to VS2010 from VS2003 a few months ago, and there are many many improvements. But the speed of Intellisense is not one of them (although it does generate higher quality results, which is great).

I read that Intellisense and the MSDN help system has been improved in VS2012. I'm curious if its actually faster? The only data I could find were graphs of an early release (VS2011).

For the record, I am using a vanilla install of VS2010 with SP1 on Windows 7 SP1 (x64). No plugins or add-ins running.

What I'm looking for specifically:

Has the speed of intellisense auto-complete improved?

Has the speed of F12 (GoTo definition) improved?

The answers to these questions will help in determining if VS2012 is worth the money to upgrade at this time as the intellisense slowness would be the only major reason for upgrading.

I'd also be interested in knowing if the help system has improved. I'm currently using MSDN help from VS2008SP1 because it has filtering and is faster.

Explanation / Answer

Yes, Visual Studio 2012's intellisense is much faster than the 2010 one. After the first database build F12 normally does not take any time at all. I switched to 2012 mainly because of the extremly slow intellisense in 2010. 2012 can work with 2010 projects without changing the project files when a 2010 compiler is installed.

In 2010 I basically stopped using "Go to definition". It is much more accurate than the 2008 version thought, which 2012 still is.

I'm using 2010 and 2012 side by side because the XBox360 debugger is only working on 2010 atm, but everytime I have to make serious changes or write new code I do it in 2012 because the 2010 intellisense makes me really angry.

Another point to consider: The vs2012 c++ compiler does allow multiprocessor compilation of compile units which massively speeds up compilation on current hardware. 2010 did only support parallel compilation of seperate projects.

UPDATE: I made some tests using a Solution containing 7 c++ 2010 projects, one exe and 6 dll projects containing around 800k lines of code. Before each test I did a "git reset --hard" and "git clean -dfx" removing all databases and temporary files from Visual Studio. First I started VS 2010, compiled the solution and waited around 5 minutes after that, then I used F12 for a few symbols and measured the wait time after each press.

~40% were executed instantaneously.
~45% were executed in 2-5 seconds
~15% took between 5 and much longer seconds; I normally stop these and use Ctrl+Shift+F instead
Next I reset everything using git and started VS 2012. I compiled the solution and waited a few minutes and repeated the tests.

95% were executed instantaneously.
5% took up to 2 seconds.
I don't see a pattern in vs2010, sometimes queries are executed very fast and sometimes it takes up to 30 seconds to find a function defined in the same file.

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