The compiler was released as part of Visual Studio 2005 last November.

"Despite the fact that we made what I still feel is a solid release, we've been clearly seeing some customers having problems with the performance of the VB 2005 compiler when used on large VB projects. In response to a number of problems that we've isolated, we've released a QFE that addresses many of the major problems people are having," said Paul Vick, a technical lead for Visual Basic at Microsoft, in his blog (http://www.panopticoncentral.net/archive/2006/08/03/13539.aspx).

Microsoft has received feedback pertaining to slow performance of the Visual Basic 2005 IDE in situations such as large projects and projects with many errors, according to the blog.

"I'm sorry that these issues made it to production and degraded'the performance of the IDE," said Microsoft's Chris Mayo, Visual Basic performance manager at Microsoft, in a memo cited in Vick's blog. "The Visual Basic Performance team is working hard to address these issues via hotfixes and the upcoming Visual Basic 2005 SP1 [Service Pack 1] while we work on engineering changes to make sure that issues such as these never make it into a shipping product in the future," Vick said.

Hotfixes released by Microsoft will be incorporated into the service pack. The current fix is available from Microsoft Product Support Services, at 1-800-936-4900.