Andrew Vos's Blog

EDIT: Tried some of these today. Results are in bold

Where I'm working now, we have a huge Visual Studio solution with hundreds of project files. The problem with this being that compile times are drastically reduced, causing great irritation and generally just hampering production.

Having a look around the web other people are definitely having this problem. Some suggestions are:

• Merge all the projects into one, or at very least merge any projects that can logically be merged. For example, unit test projects could really benefit from being merged.
• Have all projects output their bits to one directory.
• Disable anti-virus (only for the solution directory): Not much of a change. Maybe lost a few seconds build time, though results may vary. Would recommend doing this always just in case your virus checker is slowing things down.
• Combine the project files
• Create new solutions which only contain smaller parts of the code base, and linking them to compiled dlls from the other projects (DLL hell).
• Parallel builds (Tools/Options./Projects and Solutions/Build and Run/Maximum Number of Parallel Project Builds): No noticeable change. The default setting was 4 by the way.
• Stop using TFS
• Disable indexing on your source folders (windows search). No noticeable change. Didn't really expect anything to change here, because windows search has a way of delaying indexing as far as I know.

I'm going to have a look at these items tomorrow during lunch, and will update if I find anything good!

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