I'd say 'It doesn't', which is objectively impossible but does represent my perception. In 7 or 8 years of using it, I have never found it to be a problem. This is with working on C++ projects with a total size (including third party libraries like boost) of around 400 megabytes of source code. The parsing of code happens behind the scenes; sometimes (when starting VS after a major update from source control or something) you see in the status bar 'Visual Assist: updating databases' or something like that, and sometimes the syntax highlighting takes a few seconds to kick in, but again I've never been annoyed or irritated with delays for which I had any reason to believe that they had anything to do with Visual Assist.
Of course Visual Studio still does its own parsing in the background, for example for the class browser. VA provides something similar, maybe I should use that one and see if there's a way to turn off the Visual Studio Intellisense. It is my subjective impression that this one does sometimes slow down the IDE itself.
My only complaints are the recent price hikes: 249$ -_- ? Those are getting above discretionary purchasing power and although I guess there is some effective productivity gain, it's very hard to quantify and therefore justify... Especially when other people don't want it, because then if you do want it, you look like a wuss who can't hold his own without having his hand held by pretty colors (simplifying of course but let's face it, this is what it looks like from the outside).
Of course Visual Studio still does its own parsing in the background, for example for the class browser. VA provides something similar, maybe I should use that one and see if there's a way to turn off the Visual Studio Intellisense. It is my subjective impression that this one does sometimes slow down the IDE itself.
My only complaints are the recent price hikes: 249$ -_- ? Those are getting above discretionary purchasing power and although I guess there is some effective productivity gain, it's very hard to quantify and therefore justify... Especially when other people don't want it, because then if you do want it, you look like a wuss who can't hold his own without having his hand held by pretty colors (simplifying of course but let's face it, this is what it looks like from the outside).