My project is developed in Visual Studio 08, in C#. It’s a standalone desktop application, about 60k lines of code.
Once upon a time I loved working on this software – now that the compliation time has grown to approx 2 minutes, it becomes a far less enjoyable experience…
I think that my lack of experience in C# may be a factor; I have developed everything under one namespace for example – would having a well structured codebase enable the compiler to recompile only the necessary parts of the code when changes are made? Or do I need to separate sections into separate projects/DLLs to force this to happen?
How much of a difference would upgrading to the latest quad-core processor make?
The other thought is, perhaps this is a typical thing for programmers to deal with – is a long compile time like this simply something that must be managed?
Thanks in advance.
I’m surprised that 60k lines of code take 2 minutes to compile. I have an application that is 500,000 lines of code, and it only takes about a minute and a half. Make sure you are not doing full rebuilds each time, and make sure you are not cleaning the solution between builds. A normal build should perform an incremental build, only recompiling code that has changed since the last build (along with anything affected by that change.)
Perhaps some other factors might include heavy use of large resources (images?), broad-sweeping changes in the lowest level libraries (i.e. those used by everything else), etc. Generally speaking, on a relatively modern machine, compiling 60,000 lines of C# code should take less than a minute on average, unless you are rebuilding the entire solution.