Visual Studio Tip: “Avoid Rebuilding Projects Unnecessarily”

Visual Studio Tip of the Day

“Visual Studio will always try to build everything when you run a single project, even if that project doesn’t depend on everything. This choice can be changed, however.

Go to [Tools] –> [Options] –> [Projects and Solutions] –> [Build and Run] and check the box "Only build start up projects and dependencies on Run".  Then when you hit F5, VS will only build your start up project and the DLLs it depends on.”

Well, I gave this a try and it didn’t do anything.. The only sure fire way we’ve been able to prevent needless re-compilation of projects in the solution is to build with a platform specific configuration – in essence, on an x86 machine, this is to build the Solution in x86 configuration rather than the “Any CPU” configuration (which is default).

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