Now I realize that start-up time isn’t everything. Time from starting Visual Studio to compiling: 2 minutes 50 seconds. Later I came back and opened Visual Studio to write “hello world” again. I closed Visual Studio and did some more work. I started Visual Studio again, started a C# console application, inserted a WriteLine statement, and compiled. This may take a few minutes.” Seven minutes after launching Visual Studio, the application went away and my machine rebooted. When I fired up VS 2010, I spent several minutes staring at a dialog that said “Microsoft Visual Studio is loading user settings. When I first started Visual Studio 2010, it took about half an hour to write my first “hello world” example. I don’t know exactly how long it took, but it was the majority of a day. I would connect to the remote machine now and then to check on the progress. I was doing my regular work on one machine while installing VS 2010 on a remote machine. Also, I wasn’t giving the install my full attention. I’m sure it would have been faster had I started with a DVD. I was using the Visual Studio Ultimate Web Installer and much of the time was spent downloading bits. Visual Studio 2010 has not made a good first impression.

Download visual studio 2010 installer