[DevExpress Support Team: CLONED FROM KA18788: Visual Studio 2013, 2012, 2010 performance is very slow when a page with ASP.NET controls is opened in Designer]
I also built a rather large, complex form and had to split it into multiple user controls which was certainly easier to manage, but even then just provides more of a headache than the ease of use that this control promised. I too am considering disposing of this control, it's quite the headache.
Page design-time performance is slow if the page contains a lot of controls
Answers approved by DevExpress Support
Hello Chris,
Thanks for the clarification. The root cause of the issue is inside the internal algorithm that Visual Studio IDE uses to process ASPx markup that needs to be shown in the designer. The Visual Studio designer ineffectively draws controls. This is true for all ASP.NET controls, including default controls. ASP.NET developers usually encounter this situation (see Visual Studio - Why do .ASPX files take so much longer to load than .ASPX.CS files?) Since our controls reflect their appearance at design time in a very detailed manner (and as a result, they are more complex), this makes the issue more noticeable. In v14.2 + we optimized our registering logic as described in the Saving an ASP.NET page at design time is very slow in Visual Studio 2013, 2012, 2010 help article.The most efficient solution now is to use only the Source view for changing control properties and examine changes as suggested in the ASP page saving / upadting is very slow with DevExpress controls thread.
Thanks,
Artem
Hello Chris,
We greatly improve the performance in version 14.2. This is described in detail at Saving an ASP.NET page at design time is very slow in Visual Studio 2013, 2012, 2010 starting from "Fix for version v14.2+". Would you please clarify what version you use?
We're using v14.2.7, the latest version. We typically use this for WinForms and after using it for a while and seeing the gains we decided to use the ASP.net control suite to built up a complex web form.
Each user control contains a form layout control and ones with a few controls work just fine but anytime you submit changes or attempt to change individual properties of nested controls it sometimes takes upwards a minute for the changes to apply depending on how many controls there are. I can't imagine there being that much to render since we're talking about maybe 30 controls on the screen at once but it really chokes on it and has for a long time now.
Fortunately we only update this thing once a year so it's not a huge hassle but if we were constantly adding to this we would have stopped using this altogether for web development simply because of the sluggishness at design time, as well as a few other nitpicks.