I was disappointed, but certainly not surprised, to see that Microsoft employees blogging that Visual Studio 2010 performance over remote desktop would almost match, or be slightly slower than Visual Studio 2008 performance.

However, they got some good advice on how to optimize your RDP experience with Visual Studio.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jgoldb/archive/2010/02/27/optimizing-visual-studio-2010-and-wpf-applications-for-remote-desktop.aspx

Slow connections:

1. On slow connections, change remote desktop connection settings to use 16-bit color.
2. If running on high latency connections, select a “high latency” connection speed in RDC options:
   
3. On XP/Vista, grab the new remote desktop client, version 7.0.
4. Disable all check boxes except Persistent bitmap caching.
5. Also recommended is using a smaller window size (but that may be the most difficult to do).

WPF Application Optimization for Remote Desktop

In addition to the performance tips for Visual Studio, there’s a very nice set of best practices to follow for how to optimize any WPF application for use over remote desktop. Until the long-ago Longhorn promise of truly remoted-WPF applications support is added to the platform, we’ll need to optimize your WPF applications if they may be used over remote desktop.

The worst offender that I’ve encountered in the past is that animations, even hidden behind an opaque element, still cause that area of your application to be sent for each frame of the animation! (You might need to think about how silly that seems).