SurveyToGo Studio Slow when moving between items in the Design Survey screen

*** UPDATE

As of October 26th, 2016 this is not an issue anymore as Microsoft has rolled out a fix for the Windows Defender making the behavior revert back to normal. 

Overview

On October 24th, 2016 Microsoft released an update to their Windows Defender application that runs on Windows 7/8 & 10. Since this latest update, computers running Windows 10/8/7 might experience a slow-down when running the SurveyToGo Studio and accessing the survey design screen. Moving between items will take anywhere from a few seconds to half a minute and longer. The below sections detail how to fix in Windows 10/8/7.

How to fix In Windows 10

To fix this issue, you will need to do the following:

1. Open up the Windows Defender settings screen. This can be done by clicking "Start" and then searching for "Windows Defender Settings". Then click it once found:
   
   
   
   
2. Under the "Exclusions" section, click the "Add new exclusion" link:
   
   
   
   
   
3. Now, under the "Processes" section, click the "+ Exclude a .exe .." link:
   
   
   This will bring up the ability to enter a process name:
   
   
   
   
   
4. Then In the box that opens, enter OperatorConsole.exe as the new process to exclude, then click on OK.
   
   

This will fix the issue and cause the Windows Defender to not continuously scan the files created by SurveyToGo. 

Windows 8 Users 

For Windows 8 users, the same steps 1-4 should be taken as in Windows 10, but in step 3, adding a process exclusion is done from the "Options > Exclude Processes" instead:

Then continue with Step 4 like in Windows 10.

Windows 7 Users 

For Windows 7 users, the same steps should be taken, but in step 3, adding a file exclusion is done from the "Options > Exclude Files and Folders" instead:

Then continue to Step 4 as described for Windows 10, to exclude the OperatorConsole.exe file.

In Windows 7 it will require you to specify the file location. The relevant .exe is located at:

C:\Users\XXXX\AppData\Local\Dooblo\SurveyToGo Studio\OperatorConsole.exe

* replace XXXX with your user name.

Issue Technical Details

The new update to the real-time protection module of the Windows Defender now causes Windows Defender to scan every file that is written to disk. For text files that include source code like Javascript or others, Windows Defender now also performs additional much more thorough scans.

Since SurveyToGo uses Javascript as the scripting logic syntax, everytime you switch between the main node of the SurveyToGo Design tree and the different questions, the SurveyToGo Studio will re-compile the survey logic to be able to warn you regarding syntax issues. The compilation action is performed using the Windows Javascript engine, which on its own creates a temporary file with the javascript source code that it compiles. This then causes Windows Defender to scan this source code and thus causing the delay in allowing the process to write the file to disc and perform the compilation action and in turn locks up the UI until this completes. As this action is happening every time you are moving between nodes and saving the survey as well - the effects are very noticeable - the more logic in the survey the more noticeable this is.

Issue Status

At the moment we are still reviewing possible internal solutions to the issue to prevent this from happening. However at the moment the only possible work arounds are either disabling the real-time protection of the Windows Defender or the above proposed exclusion procedure.