Windows Vista Beta | WinVistaBeta.com - Message | Refactoring and performance

November 19, 2008  
Subject: Refactoring and performance
Group: microsoft.public.vstudio.general
Date: 9/17/2008 9:17:53 AM
From: Daniel James [Email Address Protection]

I've been (a bit belatedly) trying the free "Refactor!" for C++ from
Developer Express with VS2005. With Refactor! installed and a
medium-sized solution loaded the whole of Visual Studio slows to a
crawl ... it's so slow that I really haven't been able to evaluate
Reactor! ... I can barely edit code. I seem to have to wait for 5-10
seconds before Visual Studio will respond after I activate it (that is:
after I switch to VS from another application) and whenever I allow the
mouse pointer to move over a symbol in the code editor the system
freezes for a short moment.

This is a fairly quick PC -- it's a dual-core 2.2GHz AMD Athlon 64
running Windows XP x64 edition (aka NT 5.2) in 2GB of RAM -- no
well-designed piece of software should cripple it this way -- it's like
intellisense on barbiturates!

It seems that Refactor! is trying to follow the editor's context as I
work, and to pop up little menus offering to refactor things as I type
... if that's what's actually going on it's a *really* inefficient way
of working. It should keep out of my way until I want it, and then I
should be able to invoke it from a menu, toolbar button, or whatever
and select the refactoring manipulation that I want it to carry out ...
if it *then* needs some time to think that's OK.

Have other users experienced the same thing? Is there some way to
change its behaviour so that it doesn't kill the PC?

For now I've deinstalled it, but I'd really like to have some of the
functionality available that it's supposed to offer.

Cheers,
Daniel.







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Subject: Re: Refactoring and performance
Group: microsoft.public.vstudio.general
Date: 9/17/2008 10:17:22 AM
From: Rory Becker [Email Address Protection]

Hello Daniel,

Did you try contacting support [at] devexpress [dot] com. They are very interested
in hearing any reports of performance issues and will happily work with you
to try to isolate these and eliminate them.

They are happy to sign NDAs and the like if you feel that some of your code
is required to reproduce the problem. I hang out in the IDE tools forums
(http://community.devexpress.com/forums/default.aspx?GroupID=18) and try
to help out with the general usage of Refactor and Coderush.

I have not had any experience with the Free editions as I use the full versions
myself but I have to say that the context sensitive style works very well
once performance is no longer an issue.

Please consider contacting DevExpress as they would far rather help to fix
these issues than have you feel badly about the product(s)

--
Rory



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Subject: Re: Refactoring and performance
Group: microsoft.public.vstudio.general
Date: 9/18/2008 4:58:22 AM
From: Daniel James [Email Address Protection]

In article news:<3af103471ef188cae708c35a7796@news.microsoft.com>, Rory
Becker wrote:
> Did you try contacting support [at] devexpress [dot] com.

I haven't, no. I thought I'd ask here first and find out whether it was
a common problem.

> They are very interested in hearing any reports of performance
> issues and will happily work with you to try to isolate these and
> eliminate them.

IT's good to hear that they care ... but I'm not happy about your
implicit suggestion that there are problems that need to be addressed to
get the tools to work well with a specific project. This sort of tool
should just work OOTB.

> I have not had any experience with the Free editions as I use the
> full versions myself but I have to say that the context sensitive
> style works very well once performance is no longer an issue.

Again *once* performance is *no longer* an issue ... you suggest that
performance typically *is* an issue and something has to be tweaked to
get the tools to behave acceptably. Is there a FAQ on performance
issues?

The context sensitive style of UI would be OK if it weren't (as I
suspect) the cause of the slowness ... but it's not necessary. When a
programmer wants to refactor something he generally knows what it is he
wants to do and how to invoke a tool (if one is available) to do it ...
the tool doesn't have to jump up in the air shouting "Me, me, let me do
it!" every time the mouse pointer crosses a piece of code that could be
a candidate for refactoring -- that's intrusive and could get annoying
very quickly.

> Please consider contacting DevExpress as they would far rather help
> to fix these issues than have you feel badly about the product(s)

This is something I'm evaluating in my <irony>copious free time</irony>.
I'm happy to try the tools again when the opportunity arises if there
are some changes I can make to the configuration that may improve
performance, but I haven't a lot of time for this and I think that if I
contacted DevExpress on this I'd end up wasting their time.
--
Cheers,
Daniel.




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