[shadowmint]

I might be in the minority here, but I use MonoDevelop in preference to visual studio.

It's got a couple of irritating issues (the plugin support is rubbish even now, and it's ridiculously complicated to roll your own), but its just so fast.

My morning at work is: git pull, go get coffee while VS spazzes out for 5 minutes and resharper reindexes everything.

[eropple]

IMO, that sounds like an issue with your hardware. I use a three-year-old desktop with a Nehalem i7 and 16GB of RAM (or my rMBP with Parallels, which may be faster) and VS/R# is pretty happen even with 50+ projects and about 1600 source files.

Older machine? Overactive anti-virus or something causing file I/O pain?

[dbattaglia]

What version of VS are you using? I found 2010 to be painful when opening large solutions (and Resharper does not help I agree). But if you can get past the new UI changes, 2012 overall seems a lot quicker to load up and (for me at least) provides a much smoother experience. My favorite thing: the "Reload All Projects" option, for times when you do a Get Latest on your root folder outside of VS and now 35 projects need to reload at once. This was just brutal in 2010 and older versions.

[wired8]

Nothing a bit of RAM and a fast CPU can't fix... Alt if you have a very large solution with multiple projects you could split it up...