Have you noticed that your Visual Studio is slowing down during file deletes/renames? If you are utilizing Team Foundation Services in the Cloud or on premises this solution may help. After about a year of using Visual Studio with TFS, I accumulated about 10 or so "Workspaces". These workspaces are mapped directories for Source Control monitoring locally on your machine. After I was noticing a large slow down on simple file deletes/renames I decided to try and disable "Resharper" and other plugins, but this did nothing.

Secondly, I download "Procmon.exe" and ran it during a file rename. This was the key. I noticed Visual Studio was checking all files in every directory I have ever mapped. This was not efficient at all. I was wondering why it would do this and remembered whenever I checked in files I always saw files from other workspaces as well (Which was annoying). Something was up with TFS integration.

I looked up "Managing Workspaces" and I went through Source Control Explorer and selected "Workspaces" from the dropdown (Visual Studio 2k12). This brought up a dialog that let me manage my workspaces. I chose to edit my current workplace and notice there were about 12 different branches here. These were all separate projects so I chose to remove old projects and then "Cloak" ones that I did not need. I then restarted Visual Studio, and voila! Everything was so much faster. Source Control changes were very optimized and file renames and deletions were much quicker.

I hope this helps anyone out there.

More information on optimizing your workspaces.

About the Author:

Arra Derderian serves as the President and as a Lead Technical Architect for Cloud Construct. As a founder at Cloud Construct, Arra is involved in all levels of the business from new project engagements, project planning, and development.

He also serves as the founder of the Boston Orchard CMS User Group and is a member of the Windows Azure Insiders group.

Arra graduated from Northeastern University School with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science.