For most of my development work with Visual C++, I am using partial builds, e.g. press F7 and only changed C++ files and their dependencies get rebuilt, followed by an incremental link. Before passing a version onto testing, I take the precaution of doing a full rebuild, which takes about 45 minutes on my current project. I have seen many posts and articles advocating this action, but wonder is this necessary, and if so, why? Does it affect the delivered EXE or the associated PDB (which we also use in testing)? Would the software function any different from a testing perspective?
For release builds, I’m using VS2005, incremental compilation and linking, precompiled headers.
Hasn’t everyone come across this usage pattern? I get weird build errors, and before even investigating I do a full rebuild, and the problem goes away.
This by itself seems to me to be good enough reason to do a full rebuild before a release.
Whether you would be willing to turn an incremental build that completes without problems over to testing, is a matter of taste, I think.