The mechanism that VS uses to talk to the server is a bit different. It uses
the FrontPage Server Extensions to open or work on a remote project.
Depending on the server, this will be a lot slower generally because the
extensions are usually only given a small amount of resources.
The same goes for comparing opening a file in VS versus loading it in the
browser. The browser has a much bigger advantage here because the browser is
takling more directly to the web server. IIS also caches the file for better
performance on multiple loads. VS has to use the FP Server Extensions to
talk to the web server. The server extensions use more cpu cycles and aren't
as high a priority for the server so they take a bit longer. The extensions
are nice in that they do at least allow you to communicate with the web
server directly as opposed to moving files around through FTP and never
being in true communication with the web server. They do tend to be slower.
How slow often depends on how the host has the server setup and how much
concurrent traffic is on the server. It's a shame since it was a good
concept, but it appears to have difficulty handling all the data exchange
that needs to be done for VS.
