My employer has a solution with 14 projects, and coincidentally, it takes precisely 14 seconds to compile the entire application. This makes it difficult to make changes and re-compile–lots of wasted time. What are things in a .NET application I can look for to make compilation quicker? Or may I ask, what tools are the best to troubleshoot this sort of thing. (To see what’s happening with msbuild.exe)
Solution Details:
- strongly typed datasets w/ Reporting Services
- WCF services
- combination of C# and VB.NET projects
- one web application project
- resources (resx files) all over the place
- Enterprise Library (I can get specific if you need me to)
- Microsoft’s UIProcess application block for wizard navigation
- Microsoft AJAX Control Toolkit
- PdfSharp
Please ask if you need more details.
To speed up building, unload the projects you’re not working on. In the Solution Explorer, right click a project and click “Unload Project”. You can select multiple projects and unload them all at once. When you build, unloaded projects will not be built.
If a solution contains a lot of projects, you’re almost certainly only working on a few of them at any given time. If you’re working on them all at once, you need to take a look at the way you work.
This is not the same as removing the project from the solution. When you need to change/rebuild an unloaded project, it’s easily to simply reload it.