We have a large (about 580,000 loc) application which in Delphi 2006 builds (on my machine) in around 20 seconds. When you have build times in seconds, you tend to use the compiler as a tool. i.e. write a little code, build, write some more code and build some more etc etc As we move some of our stuff over to C#, does anyone have a comparison of how long something that size would take to build? I only have small apps and components at the moment, so can’t really compare. If things are going to take a lot longer to build, then I may need to change my style! Or is my style just lazy?
For example, if I’m changing the interface of a method call, rather than do a full search on all the app to find out where I need to make changes to calls, I’ll use the compiler to find them for me.
Visual Studio 2008 SP1 now has background compilation for C# (it’s always had it for VB.NET). Back in my VB days, I often used this to find where something was referenced by changing the name and then seeing where the background compiler said there was an error.
I never worked on anything quite this large. At my last job we had about 60,000 loc spread over about 15 projects and it took about 10 seconds to compile. Maybe someone else can post a slightly larger case study