visual studio 2008 build optimization

Question

In single solution we having 100 projects, if we build solution its taking lots of time to build. I want to know do we have options to increase speed of visual studio build process.

Language used for development c#.

possible duplicate of [Very slow compile times on Visual Studio](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/55517/very-slow-compile-times-on-visual-studio) — Gerrie Schenck, Nov 18 '10 at 07:49

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 08 '11 at 15:16

3

We have nearly 100 projects in one solution and a dev build time of only seconds :)

For local development builds we created a Visual Studio Addin that changes Project references to DLL references and unloads the unwanted projects (and an option to switch them back of course).

Build our entire solution once
Unload the projects we are not currently working on and change all project references to DLL references.
Before check-in change all references back from DLL to project references.

Our builds now only take seconds when we are working on only a few projects at a time. We can also still debug the additional projects as it links to the debug DLLs. The tool typically takes 10-30 seconds to make a large number of changes, but you don't have to do that often.

answered Jul 08 '11 at 15:16

iCollect.it Ltd

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Dear god please open-source that utility or release it in some manner. – Bryan Boettcher Jul 08 '11 at 15:18
@insta: Unfortunately the copyright belongs to my current client. If there was enough interest I could pay to have it rebuilt from scratch in a white-room setup, by someone other than me, but that will cost at least a dev-week (i.e. not cheap). Let's see how many upvotes it gets. – iCollect.it Ltd Jul 08 '11 at 20:19
@james lewis: Looks like I will be re-writing the add-in and releasing it after all (I have 2 other private projects to finish first though, so it will be a couple of months... guess that means I will have to make it VS 2012 compatible as well!). – iCollect.it Ltd May 08 '12 at 11:09

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 08 '11 at 15:30

A lot of the time in a large solution like that is copying dependencies around to all the various bins. You can shorten the time significantly by pointing all of the outputs to the same directory rather than the local bins.

right click on each project >> properties >> Build
Under "Output" change the path to a common directory. We use ".._builds\bin\Debug\"

visual studio 2008 build optimization

2 Answers2

We have nearly 100 projects in one solution and a dev build time of only seconds :)