In previous versions of Visual Studio the “Add Reference” dialog was always very slow to appear the first time you accessed it each session. Turns out this was because the dialog defaults to the “.NET” tab and results in a synchronous scan of the global assembly cache (blocking the UI thread). Simply by changing the scan to an asynchronous operation and having the dialog default to the “Projects” tab, the dialog will load much faster. More details in Scott’s post.

Anyway, this is the type of “feature” that is likely to get buried amongst more “exciting”, new features but it shows the type of thinking going into Visual Studio that has me exciting about this upcoming release. Sure, waiting for the “Add Reference” dialog to load may only take a few seconds but multiply that by the number of .NET developers out there and this one little tweak will save countless hours every day.

Minor tweak == Major impact