How to trim down Visual Studio to make it faster?

Question

A recent exposure to an old IDE that was as almost as responsive as notepad, and the answers I got about it, got me thinking - Visual Studio must really have a lot more stuff that I never use than I thought. It can't all come for free.

So I tried to make a list of things I never use in my Visual Studio:

• Built-in source control
• Team explorer, ServerExplorer, Architecture Explorer, UML model explorer
• Tasks List, Start Page
• Built-in web browser
• Publishing options, MSI maker
• Team Foundation Server integration
• All of the database tools - server explorer, schema editor, database sources, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Connect to database/connect to server. Etc.
• Tools: Error Lookup, ATL/MFC trace tool, Spy++, WCF config editor
• The entire Architecture menu. Diagrams, dependency graphs. All unused.
• The entire Test menu. MSTests are just not used here.

And yet, my add-in manager lists zero add-ins, and my extension manager lists one extension (color theme editor).

I have read recently that Visual Studio 2010 is essentially all extensions. And I believe that. After all 80% of the things I listed above are absent from the Express edition. It must be possible to rid my Ultimate edition of them too somehow... right?

_{It might even look like I don't use any Visual Studio from this list, but just to clear this up, I would not use another IDE that doesn't have a similarly good editor, debugger, intellisense, profiler, debugger, code navigation tools, refactoring, and did I mention debugger with all of its really handy windows yet?}

Answer 1

Seems to me you really are looking for another IDE, and that depents on what .NET language you are using. For C#, SharpDevelop comes to mind: http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/

OTOH, you could even boil it down to Notepad++ and compile through the command line. Notepad++ has code completion, but haven't tested it for all languages.