Stay in it all the time...
Well if I could make it my operating system, instead of also having to load Windows..., though I shudder at the thought. VS would be a step backwards in operating systems the way it's designed.
In one sense the argument has legs, if you have a top-of-the-line machine in CPU speed and memory. When I've complained about the slowness of some software, other people don't seem to have that experience, because they have the resources to burn. I agree with you, though, that VS has become slow. It wasn't always that way. VS 6 ran at a decent speed. It's what's come after it that's been slow, because of .Net. I'm not sure what it is about VMs and garbage-collected memory that causes this, at least with the commercial manufacturers. It's something I always noticed about Squeak. Once you get the environment loaded, which doesn't take much time, because it's small to begin with, stuff happens pretty fast, if you have your menus set up the way you need them. Starting it up takes 10 seconds. Getting an IDE window up on a class or a method is fast. Plus, compilation time is practically non-existent, since it uses incremental compilation, compiling as you go. Once you decide to run something, it just happens. And it all happens inside a VM with garbage-collected memory... The only time I've seen VS behave in a fashion similar to this is in VB.Net, when I was using VS.Net 1.1. Doing the final compile step was almost instantaneous. What always took some time was getting the debugger going.
