Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio 2019 Designers are slow after an upgrade to v19.2.3

Hello Patrik,

We will try to reproduce this locally in our test projects.
If you have any additional information that would help us in reproducing it (what actions in VS cause this / is it important to have a complex page), feel free to share it with us.

Hello Patrik,

We tried to reproduce the slowness you are describing but we were able to locate it in Visual Studio 2019 while opening the Design View for the first time. However, then, switching between the Design and Source views occurred fast. We tested VS 2017, 2019 and 2019 Preview versions.
I've attached a sample project so you can test how it works on your side. Feel free to modify it according to your needs and record a video showing the steps to reproduce the slowness in the Design View. Please also make sure that you have the latest VS updates installed. I look forward to your response.

Hello Patrik,

I was able to reproduce this issue and created the Visual Studio 2019 - It takes too much time to open the Design View for the first time report to research it.
If you are experiencing a different issue, please let me know.m

Hi,

Yes, this is exactly the problem we are experiencing (and have for several years) in both VS2017 and VS2019. For a somewhat big page, its not at all uncommon to  have to wait a minute or maybe more for it to just open. And the same goes for making changes to properites, most ot the time, but not all of the time for some strange reason.

This is especially true if you use a ASPxFormLayout or ASPXGridView with quite a few controls/columns etc (which you would in most enterprise applications).

BTW, we are also using Teleriks similar components in other project and they dont seem to have this problem (besides the fact that Visual Studio for webforms isn't exactly a rocket in general these days). So apparently it can be done.

Hello Patrik,

In VS 2017, the Design View loads faster, but this process still takes some time. We will see if we can improve this speed.

Hi,

Sorry but the newest version 19.2.3 is unbelievable slow in both VS2017 and VS2019 , to the point where we are considering downgrading only because of this (and this even though previous DevExpress versions where no rockets either). Please try to fix this.

Regards,
Patrik Johansson

Hello Patrik,

I wasn't able to observe a significant difference between v19.1 and v19.2 while working with components in design view. Please send me the markup with the set of components you are using so I can reproduce the problem in v19.2.

Hi,

Sorry for being a downer here but this seem to be a never ending story that has been going on for several years. Several customers, myself included, report that VS 2015, 2017, 2019 etc. is slow with DevExpress Controls (webforms). Each time you (the company that is) say that you have never heard of the problem before and create new tickets even thought here are already numerous from before containing the necessary information, markup etc. Sometimes it gets better and sometimes it gets worse. I think that most customers have probably already given up on this and just come to accept it as the way it is and always will be.

My conclusion is still the same, that as soon as you start to create more complex pages, with perhaps a few grids and a tabcontrol with a few tabs, these problem occur and it just gets worse a the page grows larger. This if course is not all your fault but probably mostly the poor Design View in Visual Studio, even though controls from Telerik etc does not seem to have these problems.

Regards,
Patrik Johansson

Hello Patrik,

We know that many of our customers rely on Visual Studio Design view for their projects. The simplified design-time view does not cause such issues, but unlike other vendors, we think that it is important to provide detailed design-time view support for advanced scenarios.
All of this brings with it certain costs.  You are right - the Visual Studio designer is not optimized as much as we’d like and though we improved design-time performance several times, issues exist for complex pages. Unfortunately, the Visual Studio team sometime changes the Designer's internal algorithms and we don’t have advanced notification. None of this should be taken as an excuse – It’s our job to fix the problem no matter who caused it.

Because we don’t have a detailed change list nor access to source code, addressing this issue is going to take time and resources. We are doing the research and I promise, I will follow up with you once I know more.

Hi,

Thanks for a "honest" answer. Please do what you can to make this as bearable as possible as waiting a minute or even more when opening an aspx or ascx can be a real pain, especially when you want to do something quickly. I mentioned before, I understand that this is not all up to you and Microsoft and the design view is part of the problem here.

BTW, Telerik also uses design time controls without these problems (but with some others to be fair).

Regards,
Patrik Johansson

Hi,

I also feel that visual design tools is almost a requirements for working with WebForms as the markup is so "talkative". Have tried to use only source view but it just does not work in the long run and I have yet to find a good tool to change that.

Regards,
Patrik Johansson

I have the same problema.

Visual Studio 2015 performance is very slow when a page with ASP.NET controls is opened in Designer article, i am very frustated because the timing of this project.

@Sara, @Patrik

Hello,

We are currently researching this issue. We have found a possible bottleneck that may slow down the designer. However, there is a possibility that your cases are slightly different. It can be another scenario that is not directly linked to the one we found, but it slows the designer too.
We want to avoid the situation in which we say "we fixed it", but you still see the problem because it is a different one. That is why, we kindly ask you to send us a sample project where we can observe the issue you faced to see if we've found the same one.