I read a blog the other day about the /nosplash switch in Visual Studio. Apparently, it's been around a while and I'm a little late on finding out about it. I figured I'd share it for those of you that come across this and didn't know about it as well. Basically all it does is turn off the Visual Studio splash screen which speeds up initial startup time. It's not a big difference but every little bit helps. I choose speed over looks. You can set the switch by right clicking on Visual Studio, selecting Properties, and adding "/nosplash" on the target Property, so it will look like this: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /nosplash.

Feel free to try it out and see if you like it. You can always change it back by just removing the /nosplash switch when you're done testing. There are plenty more Visual Studio switches out there but this is the main one that came in handy for me.

- Mike