I have spent the last days testing my MZ-Tools add-in with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and there are a couple of things that I have noticed: the second one is that Beta 1 breaks a lot of things in the commandbars (I am reporting all the issues to Microsoft through Microsoft Connect and I will blog about the problems in the next days/weeks), but the first one is that Virtual PC 2007 (version 6.0.156.0) is too slow, painfully slow to debug add-ins. I am using Windows XP on a modern (desktop) computer (Core 2 Duo E8400, 3 GHz, 4 GB RAM) and I have assigned 2 GB to the virtual machine but the thing is so slow that on a second (laptop) computer at home I gave up and I created a second partition on the hard disk, which I also used to play with Windows 7 RC and it seems that it runs much better.
I have never been very fan about Virtual PC since I used it to test VS 2008 “Orcas” a couple of years ago and found some problems. Considering that Visual Studio is a monster in terms of performance (I know this is an early beta, but nonetheless), that today’s hard disks have enough space for another partition that you can even create within Windows without 3rd party tools, and that installing Windows takes less than an hour, I much prefer dual boot to test VS 2010 betas than Virtual PC.
from:
http://blogs.msdn.com/quanto/archive/2009/05/13/visual-studio-2010-sdk-beta-1-readme.aspx
Make sure you disable the Historical Debugger by going to the Tools menu, select Options, and then select Historical Debugger.
I’m using VS 2010 Beta 1 inside a XP VM using Virtual PC 2007.
On my 32-bit XP desktop with 2 cores and no hardware virtualization support, it is fast.
On my 64-bit Vista desktop with 4 cores, 8 GB of ram, and hardware virtualization support, the whole VM image is dirt slow.
I don’t know why the more powerful box is struggling, but it is definitely a VM issue and not Visual Studio.
VS2010 uses WPF as its rendering engine, so it is very important to have the graphic card properly detected in the virtual machine. Otherwise it will use Software Rendering burning your CPU.