Is there a way to force Visual Studio to provide a report of why it thinks it needs to rebuild a given target, without actually doing the build? This would be similar in concept to GNU Make's -n option to disable actual building, plus the -d option for dumping out what is considered out-of-date. If the build is allowed to execute and modify files, then the modification timestamps on the files will of course change, thus hampering efforts to find exactly where the problem lies (i.e., more files are rebuilding than is deemed necessary).
I would prefer a report in text file format (or HTML) so that I can save it and use it as reference later.
This is using VS2010SP1, but I would expect a solution to also work for VS2010.
Edit #1: Seeing as how this really and truly should be a feature of the core compiler toolchain, I cross-posted a similar question into social.msdn.microsoft.com How to get Visual Studio 2008 to show what it considers out of date without rebuilding.
Edit #2: As a followup to social.msdn.microsoft.com post, I posted an enhancement request to Microsoft Connect that does not look like it will be implemented any time soon. See provide-textual-report-showing-what-visual-studio-considers-out-of-date-without-rebuilding
Related questions:
