Question

I will immediately admit completely unfamiliarity with msbuild and hope that I’m not asking a dumb question.

We have a large .NET solution that has about 316 projects in it. During the build process, it seems like a large amount of the build time is being taken up by it copying DLLs from one folder to the next (which is, I assume, so that they’re available to resolve references?). Is there a way to instruct MSBuild to just put each project’s output files into one folder to avoid needing to do this? It seems like that would be a sensible thing to be able to do as ultimately we copy the final result out of the final output folder and all those other, intermediary DLLs are just wasted.

Answer 1

It’s possible by overriding the OutDir property. e.g.:

msbuild your.sln /p:Configuration=Release;OutDir="C:\SomeFolder\Release" /m

Additionally, you can disable the CopyLocal setting for references to speed up the build process.