Why is UWP 10 development so slow?

Question

Does anyone else there have any issues with a very sluggish development experience in VS 2015 writing apps for the Universal Windows Platform 10? Compiling, debugging, even

Answer 1

Update Oct 2016

This answer is no longer relevant, as of Visual Studio 2015 Update 3. Microsoft have done a great job bringing the development environment back to a stable state. Although I currently have issues with the XAML designer, coding & building is much faster and more enjoyable. I hope most of the debilitating issues found in the XAML designer are resolved in the next Visual Studio 15.

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Has anyone experienced this

Yes.

Everyone on my team is losing hair because of UWP. I'm almost convinced that Microsoft wants me to hate C# & XAML.

...or know of any ways to speed up development?

I'm porting my app to UWP but I can't end support for Win8. So, I have both projects in the same solution. For me, to speed things up, I modified the build configurations to "Debug-UWP" and "Release-UWP" to exclude the Win8 application and projects when I'm working with the Windows 10 app. This is only a minor relief. Building is still a painful experience.

Also

You can disable NuGet from restoring packages on every build. Go to Options > NuGet Package Manager and uncheck "Automatically check for missing packages during build in Visual Studio." This is also minor, but every little bit helps.