Some tips and tricks I've picked up along the road. They might not give you a huge performance improvement, but the golden rule to disable or remove things you do not need, is always for the better. Do your own experiments and see if it helps. These screenshots are from Visual Studio 2008, but most of them should apply to Visual Studio 2005 too.

Turn off validation

Has it ever helped you anyway? Use Firebug or the IE Developer Toolbar to help you validate your markup and CSS. How this feature ever ended up in Visual Studio is a mystery to me.

Turn off the Navigation Bar

This is the drop downs you see in the markup window and in the code behind source code view.

To fill those drop downs, Visual Studio needs to parse your markup and source code. In Visual Studio I have read that this parsing can take some time. When I look at a Web Form or Master Page it in Visual Studio 2008 it looks like the drop downs are not filled when the file opens, but when I click the controls themselves, which is an improvement. This is not the case for C# files. The context is shown as I move the caret around the code.

If you want to turn it off, remove the "Navigation bar" tick on both Html / General and C# / General.

For Visual Studio 2005 this should speed things up, for 2008 - I'm unsure. It will however save you some precious screen real estate, and that is always a good thing.

Show Live Semantic Errors

This is something that was added in the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta, and as Scott puts it:

"The C# code editor now identifies and displays red squiggle errors for many semantic code issues that previously required an explicit compilation to identify.  For example, if you try to declare and use an unknown type in the C# code-editor today you won't see a compile error until you do a build.  Now with SP1 you'll see live red squiggle errors immediately (no explicit compile required)"

SP1 (Beta) for Visual Studio 2008 has focus on performance improvements, but I can never imagine this feature being especially easy on the system performance wise. I use Intellisense actively to avoid these kinds of errors in the first place (Ctrl+space is very useful), and won't waste any performance improvements in SP1 on this feature, so I turn it off:

Track changes

See the yellow line in this screenshot?

Seen it before? If not, you don't need it.

It indicates which parts of the file you have changed recently. But you are of course using Subversion and TortoiseSVN, so a quick diff in TortoiseSVN will give you the same result. If you need it. I sure don't need Visual Studio to tell me this, so I turn it off:

Animate environment tools

Ok, not a biggie, but I do not need windows to slide into view, just show them or keep'em hidden. I choose to turn this off:

Compile for the correct platform

I have seen this being mentioned several times, but unsure about the real effect it will have on your project. Some say it has a big effect, others are more reluctant. Try it yourself and see if it helps in your case.

As we're moving towards 64bit servers, this might actually give you headache down the road. It might be useful for local debug builds in your development environment though.

Speed up debugging by removing breakpoints

If you have many breakpoints lurking around your code, debugging in Visual Studio can be slow. Especially if you have conditional breakpoint rules (break if a value on a given object changes for an example). Remove all your breakpoints now an then:

Formatting XML for easy diff

While we're at it, this is not a performance thing, but immensely useful never the less. Fredrik Haglund wrote a blog entry about this some time ago, and I'll add it here while I'm doing all these screenshots anyway. You can have Visual Studio format your web.config file (and all other xml files) to keep all attributes on separate lines, which is extremely helpful when you compare versions of the same file (using a diff tool).

Turn it on like this:

Now - go tweak!