How to trim down Visual Studio to make it faster?

A recent exposure to an old IDE that was as almost as responsive as notepad, and the answers I got about it, got me thinking - Visual Studio must really have a lot more stuff that I never use than I thought. It can't all come for free.

So I tried to make a list of things I never use in my Visual Studio:

• Built-in source control
• Team explorer, ServerExplorer, Architecture Explorer, UML model explorer
• Tasks List, Start Page
• Built-in web browser
• Publishing options, MSI maker
• Team Foundation Server integration
• All of the database tools - server explorer, schema editor, database sources, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Connect to database/connect to server. Etc.
• Tools: Error Lookup, ATL/MFC trace tool, Spy++, WCF config editor
• The entire Architecture menu. Diagrams, dependency graphs. All unused.
• The entire Test menu. MSTests are just not used here.

And yet, my add-in manager lists zero add-ins, and my extension manager lists one extension (color theme editor).

I have read recently that Visual Studio 2010 is e开发者_JAVA百科ssentially all extensions. And I believe that. After all 80% of the things I listed above are absent from the Express edition. It must be possible to rid my Ultimate edition of them too somehow... right?

_{It might even look like I don't use any Visual Studio from this list, but just to clear this up, I would not use another IDE that doesn't have a similarly good editor, debugger, intellisense, profiler, debugger, code navigation tools, refactoring, and did I mention debugger with all of its really handy windows yet?}

Seems to me you really are looking for another IDE, and that depents on what .NET language you are using. For C#, SharpDevelop comes to mind: http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/

OTOH, you could even boil it down to Notepad++ and compile through the command line. Notepad++ has code completion, but haven't tested it for all languages.

The only thing I can think of is installing a different edition of VS. You say you have the ultimate edition. You could install the Professional edition instead. It doesn't contain all of that bloated functionality.

You might want to consider MonoDevelop for windows

I think it's more customizable than VS