Microsoft Visual Studio Performance Enhancements for Unreal Engine 4 – CTP1

[Shambler]

This is pretty nice - couldn't understand how intellisense was so broken in VS2013; used to crash all the time for me, when trying to use it (the VAX solution explorer sidebar, with 'symbol search', is extremely reliable though).

[Antares]

Realy good news =) gonna test that !

[Crusha K. Rool]

Will this help to make IntelliSense more reliable? It rarely ever worked for me thus far.

Any idea when the CTP will turn into an official release?

[n00854180t]

I ended up disabling Intellisense due to how much memory vpkgserv was taking up (it would spawn 2-3 processes, each would start eating 400-500MB a piece).

After doing that the performance has been great, and VisualAssist works quite well at picking up the slack.

Still, I'm quite excited to try this update out - any performance boost is going to be great.

[Tom Looman]

This is so great news! I've been completely avoiding using this feature because it was so incredibly slow.

[jwb1]

This is awesome news, thanks guys. However I find it strange that MS didn't fix this much earlier, as surely they also use it internally for their own projects, ie Windows, and you cant tell me that is not a large project.

Not that strange. They don't use it for big projects. Usually devs will have "makefile" style solutions for the bits and pieces they care about, and use an internal build tool that is a wrapper around nmake. (At least, that's how it was about 4 years ago when I left...)

[Devero]

This is great news! Time to update!

[Triplelexx]

That's great news, and is actually a significant difference!

The difference.... It's over 9000!!!

[Triplelexx]

No you don't. It depends if you want the web-deploy version, thus just "VS2013.4 CTP.exe" installer, then the installer will download everything else that's needed (the easier way) or you can download the ISO file (either the express version "vs2013.4.ctp1_tfs_exp_enu.iso" or the pro/ult version "vs2013.4.ctp1_tfs_enu.iso") depending on which version of Visual Studio you have, which has everything in it (better if want to install to multiple machines, so you only download 1 file)

Cool, makes sense. Thanks for the confirmation.

[DotCam]

That's great news, and is actually a significant difference! Also I like how they are testing Visual Studio performance using the UE4 engine code! I hope they continue using it as a benchmark, this will only make our lives easier.

[Ad3ViLl]

Wow, this is excellent news!
C++ programming has improved so much in the short time since release!

One question though.
Not sure about all these files on the download link for the update.

A few seem to be releated to TFS.
I'm not using that. Do I need to download the exe & 2 isos?

No you don't. It depends if you want the web-deploy version, thus just "VS2013.4 CTP.exe" installer, then the installer will download everything else that's needed (the easier way) or you can download the ISO file (either the express version "vs2013.4.ctp1_tfs_exp_enu.iso" or the pro/ult version "vs2013.4.ctp1_tfs_enu.iso") depending on which version of Visual Studio you have, which has everything in it (better if want to install to multiple machines, so you only download 1 file)

[timconwell]

This is indeed great news, rather unexpected, but I'll take it. Will wait a bit until I decide to raise MS a notch on my approval meter, but I hope they keep putting me this conundrum.

Can we get any clarification about the CTP release and how that'll affect our VS installs? Looks like it might prevent TFS upgrades in the future, so need there be any clear warnings about VS2013 and future upgrades?

[Triplelexx]

Wow, this is excellent news!
C++ programming has improved so much in the short time since release!

One question though.
Not sure about all these files on the download link for the update.

A few seem to be releated to TFS.
I'm not using that. Do I need to download the exe & 2 isos?

[Ad3ViLl]

This is awesome news, thanks guys. However I find it strange that MS didn't fix this much earlier, as surely they also use it internally for their own projects, ie Windows, and you cant tell me that is not a large project.

[Ivey]

Hey y’all –

Microsoft has heard your requests for better performance in Visual Studio when using it with Unreal Engine 4, and good news! Massive enhancements are now live with Visual Studio’s Fall Update CTP1, bringing extreme relief to processing times for initial solution parsing, automatic solution rescanning, and forced solution rescanning. Check out their benchmark times when tested with Unreal Engine 4!

From Microsoft's Official Announcement -

Hello C++ World!

My name is Gabriel Ha; I’m a program manager on the Visual C++ team, and from everyone who worked to bring the following improvements to you, we are super excited to share the good news and look forward to hearing back on your experience!

Some of you out there, especially those of you who frequently work with large codebases, might have seen this prompt at times while performing a basic browsing operation like Go To Definition or Find All References:



This prompt blocks you from performing those operations, sometimes for more than 5 minutes! The reason this comes up is because we need to scan your solution to make sure database entries are fresh and updated (so that those operations perform correctly). This scanning occurs under three circumstances: when you first load the solution, on its own every hour, and when you force a Rescan Solution.

Well, with today’s release of Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 CTP 1, you can enjoy huge improvements to this workflow! Check out the numbers for yourself, which we ran on a partner’s codebase (Unreal Engine 4):



And be on the lookout for further improvements we’re planning to make, like unblocking you entirely from performing browsing operations! For more information on this issue, what we did, how we did it, and who did it, be sure to check out this video where you’ll also learn more information on this issue, what we did for improvements, how we did them, and who worked on them!

Read about the new features and bug fixes in the Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 KB article and ALM team blog post

Happy Developing!

Chance