Why is the Workflow Designer so extremely slow when editing build process templates?

There's not much more to add really than the above question.

I have a fairly simple build process templ开发者_JS百科ate, which has hardly deviated from the default one.

I have two custom activities, which by recommendation live in a separate assembly within the same solution.

However....

Opening the template takes about two minutes.

Changing properties on an activity in the workflow, reordering activities in the workflow, adding activities to the workflow, all take between 30-60 seconds.

It's completely unusable at the moment and I'm beginning to regret moving from Cruise Control to TFS for build management :(

Does anyone else experience this or know a decent workaround? Is it better to simply edit the XAML text by hand?

Thanks

We just upgraded from TFS 2008 to 2010 and I have the very same experience as Steve opening the unedited DefaultTemplate.xaml file. VS 2010 even gets into not responding state. Hardware: 3GHz Dual Core, 4GB RAM.

It is not just slow but unusable.

There are two ways you can edit a build definition. (or any workflow definition)
First, you can start from root and start expanding details. All levels are shown in a single view and this approach is extremely slow. More detail items you expand, more slow it gets.

Instead, you can keep the build workflow collapsed and drill into detail items by double clicking on title which opens detail items in separate views and does not introduce any performance problems.

What OS are you using? VS 2010 is quite slow in general on Windows XP, I believe that this is due to it being built using WPF. There is a KB which is meant to speed up VS2010 in Windows XP. I've used it, but to be honest I didn't notice much difference. That could be down to the poor hardware I'm forced to use though!

Steve I agree with you. I've been using workflows for build definitions for a while and VS2010 loads them extremely slow. Furthermore, when I make any modification or save the file, it takes over 15 seconds to modify and over 40 to save and I'm running them in a pretty good machine. It would be interesting to know whether this issue has been solved in VS2012 or not. Anyone has tested it?

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UPDATE [01/02/2013]:

All this issues have been sorted out with the new versión of Microsoft Visual Studio 2012

Build process workflow templates and Visual Studio 2010 was an absolutely nightmare. As I said before it takes ages to modify anything and even tough we improved considerably our machines we did not get good results. The upgrade from VS2010 to VS2012 in build workflow templates is bit problematic, the template contains versioned namespaces which must be cleaned up in order to be used with VS2010. For further information about migrating issues visit Jason Prickett's blog.