vs2008 c# project painfully slow

Question

my largest C# VS2008 project recently became painfully slow. The moment I start typing, it takes up 100% of one of my CPUs. Building which (until recently) was very fast now takes much longer. I have disabled all add ins, cleaned the solution and still it is crawling. There is noticeable lag when I type and especially when I delete. I have also restarted numerous times. This is cutting my productivity by quite a bit, so if anyone has any ideas, I would really appreciate the help.

EDIT: Sorry, this is VS2008 SP1

Answer 1

I noticed this part:

There is noticeable lag when I type

And that makes me think intellisense. Combine that with this:

Building which (until recently) was very fast now takes much longer.

...and my psychic debugging powers tell me you likely somehow have a circular or recursive reference in your project that it can't resolve quickly.

By that I mean, Type A depends on Type B to compile which depends on Type C which in turns depends on Type A. Normally this isn't supposed to happen, but for example if 'A' has a strong name and you're referencing two different versions of the same library somewhere, Visual Studio might get confused.

Answer 2

Do you have something like codeRush installed or other plugins? If so disable all the plugins.

Have you tried opening the solution on a "clean" Visual Studio install?

Another thing that I have found is that deleting all the debug etc folders then rebuilding sometimes helpts.

Answer 3

If it only happens in this particular project, try to create a new project & import all the existing files. Other than that, check your project settings for any anomalies (but importing into a new project should also fix that).

For the dependency resolving Joel Coehorn suggests, try a tool like NDepend to visualize the dependencies quickly.

Answer 4

I noticed this issue occured on a solution that had multiple parojects with large datasets in each. Excluding the datasets until compile time eliminated the lag.