How to improve Visual Studio 2008 Website Compilation Perfomance

Question

I am having severe performance issues when compiling a moderately large ASP.Net website in Visual Studio 2008 (targeting .Net 3.5). I know there are some tips & registry hacks for improving compilation performance in VS 2005, are there any for VS 2008? Specifically, it seems that VS 2008 is compiling the whole website every time F5 is hit, even when no files have changed in that project since the last compile, or perhaps there is some way to skip the validation stage?

Answer 1

• Antivirus problems: Make sure that your Antivirus program excludes your project directories! Make sure that your Microsoft.NET directory inside of your Windows directory is also on the exclusion list.

• IIS vs. "Cassini" : If you can, use IIS instead of VS's integrated web server (aka "Cassini"). Doing this will prevent the server from having to restart every time you run.

• Memory: Do you have enough?