Tips for Visual Studio 2019 users

D

DSmart

Bit poster
I do Windows web development in Visual Studio 2019 on a MacBook Pro 16-inch 2019. After quite a bit of trial an error I've found the following options work
best:
  • Use the Apple Hypervisor: (Options > Hardware > CPU & Memory > Advanced). When running the Parallels hypervisor, builds that normally take a few seconds would use loads of CPU and take over a minute.
  • Use Parallels version 15. I had to downgrade to 15 after installing version 16 because Windows would freeze when booting in Apple Hypervisor mode (see above)
Other tweaks
  • Ensure Optimization > Resource usage is set to No limit.
  • Set excluded folders for Microsoft Defender against your code directories.
  • Consider creating as Boot Camp install for Windows and getting Parallels to run that. My builds run about 10-20% faster running directly off the SSD like this.
Note to Parallels support:
  • Please fix Parallels 16 so that we can run Windows 10 in Apple Hypervisor mode without it freezing (I tried boot flag video.metal=0 but that didn't help things), or even better ...
  • Fix Parallels Hypervisor so that very I/O intensive processes such as compilers don't kill the CPU and take forever.
Hope that helps!
 
I have come to the exact same conclusions as you, and I've now reverted to v15. Which has the added bonus that the "Smooth Scrolling" option is there to be unchecked, which has the effect of making two-finger trackpad scrolling in code editor windows smooth again.

My solution rebuilds in about 30 seconds on v15/Apple hypervisor vs about 4 minutes on v16/Parallels hypervisor.
 
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