Announcing the Forums Bug Submission Pilot (Sarika Calla)

VBTeam — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:19:41 GMT

In addition to Connect, you can now report Visual Basic bugs directly in the Visual Basic Forums. The forum posts get entered as a bug or product suggestion into VB’s internal bug tracking system. With this we hope to take Forums (our vibrant online channel for feedback) a step further by making it easier to submit bugs and product suggestions. Currently this pilot is integrated with 3 Visual Basic Forums, Visual Basic Language, Visual Basic Interop and Upgrade and Visual Basic Power Packs. Depending on the feedback we receive, we will consider enabling this functionality in more forums!

Here’s how it works.

1. From within a forum, click on the <New Thread> button to start new thread.

2. From within the new thread UI, select the <Bug Report> radio button. The Message field will be populated with a Bug report template automatically for you.

3. Complete the bug report template, filling in all the sections

4. If you want to add an attachment, click on the <Browse> button below the message field, then locate and select the file to be uploaded. If you want to add multiple attachments, click on the <Add> button; this will display an additional Browse control. For each file you want to upload, you will need to add a unique attachment.

5. If you’ve pasted a code sample into the Message field, please select the “This post contains a code sample” checkbox in lower left corner of Message UI.

6. When you have completed these steps, click on the <Post> button at bottom on right. The bug report will then be displayed for review.

This is a pilot program. Your feedback is very important for us to make decision regarding this going live or not. Please give it a try and send us your feedback. To send the feedback on the bug submission pilot, you can use the “Feedback for Visual Basic Bug Submission Pilot” forum.

VB2008 Outperforms VB2005! (Lisa Feigenbaum)

VBTeam — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:08:00 GMT

Looking for another reason to upgrade to 2008? How about performance! In addition to making tasks easier for you from release to release, another way we can save you time and make you more productive is by making the product faster! This is a goal we are very commited to on the VB team, and for which we have dedicated an entire virtual team for the Orcas release. Take a look at the stats below to see some interesting improvements.

[**DISCLAIMER: The data posted here is what I have observed from comparing 2 runs in our internal labs. These are my observations using two large customer solutions on a specific machine. Some people will have faster systems and some will have slower. Also, the work required for each operation will differ based on your solution. Thus, your results may be better or worse. The interesting thing is to look at the improvement between versions on identical hardware. I am posting this data to try and give you a general idea of the changes - but these numbers are by no means meant to be used as an industry standard.

For those interested, here's some data on the solutions and machine that I used... One solution contains 29 projects and 2772 files, with xml comments on all methods and types. The other solution used contains 783 files. The machine has the following specs: Dual Core Pentium-D - 3.0GHz, 1GB RAM, 10K RPM HD. OS=XP. These are one of many machine specifications that we use for our internal performance testing.]

Scenario	VB2005 Time (ms)	VB2008 Time (ms)	VB2008 is x times faster than VB2005 (2005 time/ 2008 time)	VB2008 takes x% as much time as VB2005 (100% * 2008 time/ 2005 time)
Build a large project (using background compilation)	222206.25	1352.88	164.25	0.61%
Build a large multi-project solution (explicit build operation)	1618604.75	57542.75	28.13	3.56%
Build a large multi-project solution (using background compilation)	222925.50	19861.88	11.22	8.91%
Responsiveness after adding a member to a class	327.00	36.50	8.96	11.16%
Responsiveness after opening a project	255551.25	38769.38	6.59	15.17%
Invoke Intellisense to see a list of types (first time)	1192.50	530.5	2.25	44.49%
Edit-and-Continue in a solution with xml comments (first time)	441.25	210.5	2.10	47.71%
Responsiveness after changing a method statement	390.25	236.38	1.65	60.57%
10 Steps in the debugger (subsequent times)	1850.75	1167.13	1.59	63.06%
Invoke Intellisense to see a list of types (subsequent times)	79.25	51.5	1.54	64.98%
F5 when the solution is already built (subsequent times)	385.20	278.7	1.38	72.35%
Item gets added to the Error List after making an error	531.25	394.5	1.35	74.26%
10 Steps in the debugger (first time)	1336.50	1150	1.16	86.05%
Responsiveness while background compiling on an open solution	4803.00	4284.75	1.12	89.21%
Load a large solution (subsequent times)	13667.5	12407.25	1.10	90.78%
Load a large solution (first time) (Note: This is the improvement on XP. Vista has seen about twice as much improvement for the Load Solution scenario than XP. )	19946.25	18222	1.09	91.36%

** All times are found by performing operations on customer solutions. Don't you wish we were using your solution to optimize our times? Send it in so that we can optimize for you! (vbperf@microsoft.com) We are always interested to get more customer projects for our testing.

Is there another scenario you're interested that you don't see above, where you continue to experience performance lags in your regular usage of the product? Please send in repro steps so we can take a look! (vbperf@microsoft.com)

Other interesting VB2008 Performance content to check out is listed below:

In this Channel9 video, VB perf developer Cameron McColl talks about and demonstrates several of the VB perf improvements in Orcas: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=328382#328382. Stepping, first-time intelliSense, errors in the task list, editor responsiveness, large solutions, and web apps are a few examples of areas where we have focused on improving performance in VB2008.
Cameron also demonstrates many of these improvements in his webcast linked here: http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2007/07/24/today-s-performance-webcast-slide-deck-and-channel9-interview-beth-massi.aspx

The Visual Basic Team : Sarika Calla

Announcing the Forums Bug Submission Pilot (Sarika Calla)

VB2008 Outperforms VB2005! (Lisa Feigenbaum)