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We have a moderately sized solution, with about 20 projects. In one of them I have my business entities. On compiling any project, visual studio waits and hangs about one and a half minutes on this BusinessEntities project.

I tried our solution in SharpDevelop and it compiles our complete solution, in 18 seconds. Similar timing with MSBuild.

My guess is that VS is trying to find out if the project needs a compile, but this process is about 15 times slower than actually performing the compile!!

I can't switch to the great sharpdevelop, it lacks some small, but essential requirements for our debugging scenarios.

Can I prevent VS from checking this project, And have it compile the projects without such a check, just like sharpdevelop?

I already know about unchecking projects in configuration management to prevent building some projects, but my developers will forget they need to compile this project after updating to latest sources and they face problems that seem strange to them.

Edit: Interesting results of an investigation: The delay happens to one of the projects only. In configuration manager I unchecked all projects, then compiled each of them individually. All projects compile in a few seconds!! The point is this: if that special project is built directly, compiles in a few seconds, if it is being built (or skipped, because it is up-to-date) as a result of building another project that depends on it, VS hangs for about a minute and half, and then decides to compile it (or skip it). My conclusion: Visual studio is checking to know if any files are changed, but for some reasons, for this special project it is extremely inefficient!!

Alireza
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    If you don't need to compile the business entities component a lot, you could consider adding a reference to the DLL it produces, rather than the project. – dash Aug 23 '12 at 07:55
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    Did you connected to Team Foundation Server (TFS) while building the project? VS mostly slows downs if you are connected to TFS Server and your project is online. It happens because it tries to get latest each time. That is fine if you are using sharpdevelop for debugging purpose in your scenario. I always prefer to build project by using MSBuild, that saves my time. – PawanS Aug 23 '12 at 08:00
  • @dash No, it is changed quite frequently. – Alireza Aug 23 '12 at 08:20
  • @GAPS No, we're not using TFS. We use svn, I also tested the build in a vs without svn plugin, nothing changed! – Alireza Aug 23 '12 at 08:21
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    @Alireza Are there any suggestions here that are helpful? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/55517/very-slow-compile-times-on-visual-studio – dash Aug 23 '12 at 08:47
  • @Alirreza Must be Visual Studio doing other stuffs during build, need to be figure out. Let me search for any optimization for VS. :) – PawanS Aug 23 '12 at 11:50
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    Do you have any VS extensions installed? If so, try disabling them, restarting VS, and seeing if anything changes. Also, if you have ReSharper, and if it seems to be the problem, ReSharper 7 has a built-in profiler that can profile VS while it's running, which would let you send JetBrains a bug report with the profile results. (We use ReSharper with a 100-project solution and 1.5M lines of code, and haven't seen a delay like this -- but it's still worth mentioning in case it helps you out.) – Joe White Aug 25 '12 at 13:18
  • Well, I had this problem with no extensions. Yes, this is something that happens to only one of our projects, See the edit. – Alireza Aug 26 '12 at 04:23
  • Are all the projects set to x86 builds? I had a slow building solution with an imported vs2008 project that targeted AnyCPU, changing that project to target x86 fixed it in my case. – Kris Sep 01 '12 at 00:51

11 Answers11

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I'd go to Tools -> Options -> Projects and Solutions -> Build and Run and then change the "MSBuild project build [output|build log] verbosity" to Diagnostic. At that level it will include timings which should help you track down the issue.

Kaleb Pederson
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  • Already did that. In the per-project report, it says it has built the project in a few seconds! The reason is that this report is generated by msbuild, and the silly delay happens before VS hand the project to msbuild. – Alireza Aug 26 '12 at 05:48
  • Ahh :(. Aside from profiling as Feng Yuan recommended, you might try "Process Monitor" from the Sysinternals suite and see if something comes up for that time period. – Kaleb Pederson Aug 27 '12 at 01:59
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There is the possibility that you are suffering from VS inspecting other freshly built assemblies for the benefit of the currently compiling project.

When an assembly is built, VS will inspect the references of the target assembly, which if they are feshly built or new versions, may include actually loading them in a .Net domain, which bears all the burdens of loading an assembly as though you were going to run it. The build can get progressively slower as it rebuilds more and more projects. When one assembly becomes newer the others do a lot more work. This is one possible explanation for why building by itself, versus already built, versus building clean, all have seemingly relevantly differing results. Its really tht the others changed and not about the one being compiled.

VS will 'mark down' the last 'internal' build number of the referenced assembly and look to see if the referenced assembly actually changed as it rolls through its build process. If its not differnt, a ton of work gets skipped. And yes, there are internal assembly build numbers that you dont control. This is probalby not in any way due to the actual c# compiler or its work or anything post-compile, but pre-compile steps necessary for the most general cases.

There are several reference oriented settings you can play with, and depending on your dev, test, or deployments needs, the functional differences may be irrelevant, however may profoundly impact how VS behaves and how long it takes during build.

Go to the references of one of the projects in Solution Explorer:

1) click on a reference

2) open the properties pane if its not (not the Property Pages or the Property Manager)

3) look at 'Copy Local', 'Embed Interop Types', 'Reference Output Assembly'; those may be very applicable and probably something good to know about regardless. I strongly suggest looking up what they do on MSDN. 'Reference Output Assembly' may or may not show in the list.

4) unload the project, and edit the .proj file in VS as text. look for the assembly reference in the XML and look for 'Private'. This means whether the assembly referenced is to be treated as though its going to be a private assembly from the referencing assemblies perspective, vs a shared one. Which is sort of a wordy way of saying, will that assembly be deployed as a unit with the other assemblies together. This is very important toward unburdening things. Background: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164080.aspx

So the basic idea here is that you want to configure all of these to be the least expensive, both during build and after deployment. If you are building them together, then for example you probably really don't need 'Copy Local'. Id hate to say more about how you should configure them without knowing more about your needs, but its a very fine thing to go read a few good paragraphs about each. This gets very tricky however, because you also influence whether VS will use the the stale old one when resolving before the referenced one is rebuilt. As a further example explaiing that its good to go read about these, Copy Local can use the local copy, even though its stale, so having this set can be double bad. Just remember the goal at the moment is to lower the burden of VS loading newly built assemblies jsut to compile the others.

Lastly, for now, I can easily say that hanging for only 1.5 mins is getting off very lucky. There are people with much much worse build times due to things like this ;)

Beeeaaar
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  • At this time, my problem is actually solved. I don't know why! We had this problem for almost a year. BTW, I think that the closest answer to the actual reason of the problem should be this one. – Alireza Sep 02 '12 at 04:59
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We had the same problem with an ASP.NET MVC web project running in Visual Studio 2013. We build the project and nothing happens for about a minute or so and then the output window shows that we are compiling.

Here's what fixed it... open the .csproj file in a text editor and set MvcBuildViews to false:

<MvcBuildViews>false</MvcBuildViews>

I had to use sysinternals process monitor to figure this out but it's clearly the cause for my situation. The site compiles in less than 5 seconds now and previously took over a minute. During that minute the Asp.net compilation process was putting files and directories into the Temporary Asp.net Files folder.

Warning: If you set this, you'll no longer precompile your views so you will lose the ability to see syntax errors in your views at build time.

AaronK
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Some troubleshooting idea's that have not been mentioned:

  • Clean solution?

  • Delete Obj and Bin folders plus the .suo file? FYI, neither Clean nor Rebuild will delete non-build files, eg files copied during a pre-build command.

  • Turn off VS scanning outside files. Options > tools > environment > document > detect when file is changed outside the environment?

  • Rollback SVN history to confirm when it started to occur? What changed? If the project file on day 1 takes the same time, recreate the project, add all the files and build.

Otherwise could you please run Process Monitor and let us know what Visual Studio is doing in the prep-build stage?

Jeremy Thompson
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    Another thought, delete the .suo file(s). I've seen a few strange issues that I could never track down that disappeared after removing them. – Kaleb Pederson Aug 27 '12 at 01:59
  • Simply cleaning my project build files and doing a full rebuild fixed mine. Subsequent builds were much faster. Thanks! When things impact performance at this level, Visual Studio really should be doing something to deal with this automatically without users manually cleaning up after it. – Robert Mar 20 '22 at 19:09
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Sounds silly, but remove all breakpoints first. It sped up my pre-build checks massively - still don't know why though.

PeteGO
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Based on the (limited) information provided one possibility is that there could be a pre-build action specified in the project file that is slow to compile.

Zaid Masud
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Try disabling platform verification task as described here.

Hassanation
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  • I found this (http://www.developer-corner.com/2009/07/platform-verification-task-leading-to.html) more accurate – Paolo Dec 23 '13 at 16:28
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If your individual projects are compiling correctly then all you can do is change order of compilation by setting dependent projects explicitly in configuration.

Try to visualize your project dependency hierarchy and set dependent projects. For example, if your business entities project is referenced in each project, then in configuration of each project, this project must be selected as dependent.

When an explicit build order is not set, visual studio is analyzing projects to create an order of building project. Setting explicit dependent projects wiki make visual studio skip this step and use the order provided by you.

Akash Kava
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  • VS starts to build the project almost instantly, When it reaches this specific one, it hangs out on Build Started.... for a minute and half, and then everything is rapidly continued. – Alireza Sep 01 '12 at 06:02
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With such an extreme delay on a single project and no other avenue seeming to provide a reason I would attempt to build that specific project while running procmon from sysinternals and filter out all the success messages. You could probably also narrow it down to just the file system actions as well. From your description I might guess that the files are being locked by an external source like the event collection or workflow management process services.

Other things to consider would be whether or not this is a totally clean build machine or if it has been used to perhaps test the builds as well? If so, is there a chance that someone mapped an IIS application path to the project directly or registered it as a service location?

If you run procmon and see no obvious locks or conflicts I would create a totally new solution and project and copy the files over to see if that project also has the same delay. If it does have the same delay I would create a sample project of the same type but generic data (essentially empty) and see if that too is slow. If the new project with the same files builds fine you can then diff the directories to see what the variance is that causes the problem (perhaps a config or project setting).

Carth
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For me, thoroughly disabling code analyzers helped per instructions here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/code-quality/disable-code-analysis?view=vs-2019#net-framework-projects.

I thought my code analyzers were already off, but adding the extra xml helped.

Thanks Kaleb's for the suggestion to set "MSBuild project build [output|build log] verbosity" to Diagnostic. The first message took more than 10 seconds to display:

Property reassignment: $(Features)=";flow-analysis;flow-analysis" (previous value: ";flow-analysis") at C:\myProjectDirectory\packages\Microsoft.NetFramework.Analyzers.2.9.3\build\Microsoft.NetFramework.Analyzers.props (32,5)

Which led me to the code analyzers.

Heath Walker
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Just in case someone else trips into this issue:

In my case the delay was being caused by an invalid path entry in "additional include directories" that referred to a non accessible UNC location.

Once this was corrected, the delay disappeared.

MandoMando
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