Question

I have the application (solution in VS2010) with +-10 projects. Some of these projects are quite large (dozens of folders and hundreds of files).

When I make a change in project on lower level and I want to run my tests (+-10 seconds) then I have to wait 2 minutes for projects build.
This is very inefficient.

Is there any way to speed-up build? For example, split current projects into multiple projects or something else?

Or are there some general advice and recommendations to speed-up building projects in Visual Studio?

Answer 1

In my experience solutions with large number of projects build slowly on vs2010 and there is not much you can do about it:

1. Reduce number of projects – larger single project will build faster then many smaller.
2. Prepare set of build configurations Build->ConfigruationManager to build only parts of your project since you don’t have to build projects that depend on changed project if public interface is not changed. This can be tricky to use and some unexpected errors might occur in runtime. Also make sure that all your projects point to single Bin\Debug Bin\Release folder so that new dlls are loaded on application start. This is requited because if you don’t build project its dependencies wont be copied to its output directory.
3. Upgrade to vs 2012. This is the best option you can choose.