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 -
Happy Developing!
Chance
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.
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?
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?
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)
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. 
Cool, makes sense. Thanks for the confirmation.
The difference… It’s over 9000!!!
This is great news! Time to update!
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…)
This is so great news! I’ve been completely avoiding using this feature because it was so incredibly slow.
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.
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?
Realy good news =) gonna test that !
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).
Nice, will check it out now 
I had vs2013.0 installed.
I downloaded “*vs2013.4.ctp1_tfs_exp_enu.iso” and *“VS2013.4 CTP.exe”, i inserted .iso and then launched “VS2013.4 CTP.exe”, so installer doesnt use download, it uses offline .iso automatically, thats cool.
I installed CTP1, it did not improve intellisense find references and F12 accuracy, but “prescan” and “rescan” seams really cool, after install i had long “initial prescan”, but after reopenning project it doesnt rescan, thats cool, i think there will not be “per hour” rescan too, thats perfect, that was really annoying.
After installation of CTP1, Visual Assist and other plugins still work, everything is fine, nothing additional actions required.
Installation was perfect, without any warning message or interruption.
If you are looking for Visual Studio,[Dvoyles@microsoft.com"] shoot me an email.](mailto: [email)
I’m an evangelist at Microsoft, working with startups and indie developers, so I can likely set you up with a copy of Visual Studio through our BizSpark program. We’re all about folks taking advantage of our tools to write for UE4!
Perks of the program:
Who qualifies?
Keep making awesome games in UE4.
I have both Visual Assist and the handy Productivity Power Tools extension installed, and I use PPT’s ‘Ctrl+Click Go To Definition’ feature a lot - which (upon holding Ctrl), turns the hovered-over code editor symbol, into a hyperlink which opens up a ‘peek’ window to the symbols definition.
Every now and then though when I use this, it triggers the ‘intellisense searching’ or such dialog box - and I’ve learned that there’s no point letting that do work, it’s better to just immediately hit ‘cancel’, as it takes ages without finding anything.
Even more rarely though, it will trigger the dialog box and then will freeze VS2013 entirely, and eventually after many minutes, it will show a ‘peek’ window with a ‘failed to find null symbol’ or such type of error.
Equally as often as that though (rare but still sometimes) VS2013 will just crash entirely.
In addition to all this: When VS2013 does crash, it loses all open tabs and such upon the next launch - this is a bit of an inconvenience, when I’m working in a lot of files at once (which is pretty regular); the crashes are annoying, but they would not be so bad, if I could just launch up again and start where I left off - with all the same tabs etc…
EDIT: I do, of course, have the update in the OP installed 
Just to note: Since this thread (which was for VS2013 Update 4 CTP1), a new CTP2 version was released on September 22nd, which says in its release notes, that it fixes the ‘Go To Definition’ issue I mentioned above:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44240
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2014/09/22/visual-studio-2013-update-4-ctp-2-now-available.aspx
Says it should have more performance improvements too - have it installed here, working/building fine.