Long delay before Visual Studio starts to build

Question

I have a solution with 50 projects, and each project has a minimum of 100 files (which I think is relevant).

The issue is when I build the solution, or a single project, that there is a delay of 5 to 10 seconds before the "Build Output" window gets written to. Setting the "Build Output" verbosity to "Diagnostic" does not give any indication as what the cause of the delay is. This delay even occurs when no files have been changed (previously built).

=== Build: 0 succeeded, 0 failed, 10 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========

When there are changes, in the Build Output, it says the build took approximately 2 seconds to complete, however the end-to-end takes roughly 7 to 12 seconds.

Build output:

1>(omitted)
1>Time Elapsed 00:00:01.99
========== Build: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 9 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========

MSBuild:

Build succeeded.
     0 Warning(s)
     0 Error(s)

 Time Elapsed 00:00:02.17

 C:\Projects\SharedKernel.Tests>

Running MSBuild through the command line has no such delay, the 2.17 seconds is the time when pressing on the keyboard to completion.

From what I can tell, the msbuild tasks themselves execute quickly in Visual Studio, but it seems Visual Studio is doing something behind the scenes before the msbuild tasks start that is causing this delay.

When I inspect Visual Studio (devenv.exe) though Process Monitor I notice calls to CreateFile, QueryDirectory, and CloseFile for every file and folder in the project and the project's dependencies. This seems to correlate to the delay when looking at the timeline.

How do I reduce the delay from when I start build the build process from within Visual Studio (right click on project > build), to when the build actually occurs?

I looked at the following answers for resolution, however they either do not reduce the delay or are simply not applicable:

• Visual Studio Long wait before Starting to build
• Visual Studio hangs for 20 seconds before start building
• Visual Studio taking long time to build and load solution because of Nugget

Answer 1

I think your problem is "I have a solution with 50 projects". In my experience this should not be used for development. This should only be used for a build server. So what I would do is, make several solution files. One big with all projects for the build server, and several ones with just a few projects for development. The packaging of this several solutions should be guided by what often changes together. If the answer is everything I would question the project structure.

Because I do not realy answer your question what exactly vs does in comparison to msbuild, I would normaly write this as a comment. But my reputation is not enough right now (working on that) but because no one else recommended this, I thought it would passibly be worth an answer. Or is this just too obvious that nobody pointed this out? Then please forgive me.