title: Do you have performance problems when you work on Visual Studio projects via a network share?
body: <p>We have tremendous problems with Visual Studio (2008, if that matters) locking up and slowing down when accessing projects over a network drive.  It can take several minutes to open a large Web site project through a mapped drive, and saving even a single file can take a minute or more.</p>
  
  <p>I fired up Wireshark and watched the traffic.  VS, it seems, requests massive amounts of files from the network -- there's an enormous amount of SMB traffic.  I've done some research, and this traffic seems to stem from two situations.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>VS has to have everything in its own process to provide Intellisense.</li>
  <li>VS needs to have all the source in order to compile the project.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>All the advice I've read seems to boil down to the same thing: work locally, not on a remote machine, then push your code to an integration server via source control.</p>
  
  <p>This would sure solve our problems (VS is quite fast working locally), but what if you <em>can't</em> work locally?  What if the project and the infrastructure required to run it is too large and complicated to be replicated on everyone's individual machines?</p>
  
  <p>We've gone 'round this problem a couple times, and the only way we can figure to work on these projects is direct access via a mapped drive.  However, the VS slowness and lockups are really becoming a problem.</p>
  
  <p>One solution: we installed VS on the server and work on the projects directly on the servers via RDP.  Seriously.</p>
  
  <p>So, I ask:</p>
  
  <p>What does everyone else do?  Do you work via the network, or do you replicate projects locally?  If remotely, do you suffer from VS performance issues.</p>