The VB team at Microsoft released several tests showing how fast various operations performed in the IDE. The tests were all performed both in Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005 to test how much more productive Visual Studio 2008 can be for developers.

The tests were released in a blog titled “VB2008 Outperforms VB2005!”. However, the tests were not measuring the performance of code written in VB2008, but rather were tests within the IDE, such as how long it takes to build a project or how quickly Intellisense kicks in.

Compiling a large project as a background compilation came in with the highest improvement over VB2005, at 164.25 times faster. (The blog doesn’t give any specifics about the projects, as this test was quite informal and not performed by a third party benchmarking test.)

Other items that showed large improvements over VB2005 included:

• Build a large multi-project solution (explicit build operation)
• Build a large multi-project solution (using background compilation)
• Responsiveness after adding a member to a class
• Responsiveness after opening a project
• Invoke Intellisense to see a list of types (first time)

The blog entry can be found here.