Problems with very large projects

Posted by stegess on Wed 15 of Oct, 2008 19:06 GMT

So far we've had great success with the add-in for visual studio 2003. This is an awesome tool.

However, we have a number of very specialized VB.NET projects that contain over 150 different forms.

The main problem we ran into was that the tool wants to scan every file in the project, and this caused excessive delays. For example, my system took about 30 minutes to scan the controls and source code of this type of project. I also ran into out-of-memory problems several times.

We also found issues related to the fact that we use visual inheritance. We may be able to fix this by going into each of our child forms and adding code to ensure that things don't run while in design mode.

It seems that the main problem could be addressed if we were presented with a list of all files in the project from which we could select only those we wanted to scan. After we had completed work with those, we could uncheck them so they would be ignored from future scans.

Can you give some thoughs on this? We are really in a bind at the moment.

Thanks!

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Posted by Phil on Wed 15 of Oct, 2008 21:17 GMT Germany

Hi,

I am have separate versions of the Add-In for VS 2002, VS 2003 and VS 2005/2008.

The version for VS 2002 is effectively dead. I haven't updated it for over three years and I doubt if anybody is still using it.

I have recently been neglecting the version for VS 2003 as well. This started when I made some major changes to the ASP support, only for VS 2005/2008.

However, I am currently merging a lot of changes from the version for VS 2005/2008 back into the version for VS 2003. I expect to make a new version for VS 2003 within the next week.

I think that these changes will improve the performance with VS 2003 anyway, but I am going to take another look at the preformance problems.

I will also be taking a look at the problems with inherited forms. Again, I know that some problems are fixed for VS 2005/2008, but not for VS 2003, and I will be merging these changes into the VS 2003 version.

With regard to scanning only selected components, I think that the current version for VS 2003 (which is 4.00.0054) already has a way to do this. When you select the project, it shows a dialog before it starts the scan, with the option to scan, initialize from the database, or not to initialize at all. If you click on the refresh button on the toolbar, you should see a menu with the option "Rescan Selected Components". This shows a dialog in which you can select exactly which components you want to scan.

If that command is not there, then it will certainly be present in the next version for VS 2003 (because it is already in my working version).

Phil

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Posted by stegess on Thu 16 of Oct, 2008 19:57 GMT

One additional consideration...

When adding support for runtime language switching, the add-in appears to scan all of the files (or maybe it is loading from a database) to determine the current status (i.e. missing or present) of the ml_UpdateControls() and LanguageChanged handler. This scan seems to take quite long time when there are a huge number of forms in the project

One simply solution would be to provide an option which allowed us to disable this feature. In this case, bringing up this dialog would not rescan anything. All of the componenents would be un-checked initially, and we would be responsible for checking off those which we wanted to update on the current pass.

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Posted by Phil on Thu 16 of Oct, 2008 22:28 GMT Germany

You are right. I will take a look at this.
Phil

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