The Visual Studio team just announced that the Visual Studio 11 will have the same hardware requirements as Visual Studio 2010.  So, we’re getting more features, they’ve improved the performance throughout (yes, I am using it and the differences are obvious in places), and we could run it on yesterdays hardware, but we’re likely to have upgraded since then so faster still.

This seems to be a trend at Microsoft, or at least I hope it is.  Earlier this year (or was it at Build last September) they announced that they had improved the performance and memory usage in Window 8 to the point where it was faster than Windows 7, used less memory and that the minimum requirements wouldn’t change from the Windows 7 minimums.

For so many years improvements in hardware were negated by bloat in software.  If this trend continues we should be computing noticeably faster in a few years.  Combine that with Microsoft’s push around asynchronous programming and the user experience a few years from now could be vastly better than it is today.

Of course Microsoft can only do so much, it’s now up to the world 3rd party and in-house developers to take up the challenge and write software that uses less memory, performs better and runs all long running processes asynchronously.  Microsoft targeted processes that take longer than 50 ms, I might raise my target a bit above that, but I am accepting the challenge.