So I tried the new virtual machines on Azure for Visual Studio.  I’ve always dreamed of using a vm to do my development on, but never really trusted it because Visual Studio (VS) is such a performance hog.  Well, here are my results.  I downloaded “ImageResizer” from Codeplex, a popular C# program, and then built it on my local machine and the Visual Studio VM.  My local machine runs 64-bit Win 8.1 Pro with a Intel i5 4670K CPU @ 3.4 GHz and 8 GB of RAM.  It is also on VS Ultimate 2012.  The Azure VM has a AMD Opteron Processor 4171 HE at 2.10 GHz and 3.5 GB of RAM on 64-bit Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter.  It is running VS Pro 14 CTP (the latest and greatest).

Now, the results.

My local machine built it in ~1.1 seconds.  

The VM built it in ~3.1 seconds.

A factor of 3.  Not great, but not that bad either.  I could see myself doing it, maybe….  lots of advantages (clean machine, always running the latest and greatest, etc.).  But it still feels like it’s on the cusp of prime time.