Install entire visual studio on ramdisk?
From my experience changing the installation path of Visual Studio is possible but may cause a lot of problems later. I would not try to change the location Microsoft where thinks an installation have to be. Instead I would use the NTFS soft link feature and pretend that Visual Studio and some of the other components are installed on C:\Program Files\...
where as in reality they are located on the RAM drive:
- Format your RAM disk with NTFS (if it is not already in this format)
- Copy the directories you would like to mirror to RAM onto the RAM drive (better use command line, not Explorer) - the exact target path on the RAM drive does not matter
- rename the original directory in your Program Files directory (e.g. "Visual Studio" to "Visual Studio_".
- Create a symbolic link from
C:\Program Files\Visual Studio
to your ram drive (R: in this example):
mklink /D "C:\Program Files\Visual Studio" "R:\Visual Studio"
Now your Visual Studio installation on the C-Drive points to your RAM-Drive. And the best is that you can automate the whole process via a batch script.