Speeding up build times in ASP.NET

Question

I am currently involved in a ASP.NET project with about 40 projects in the solution. We are doing all our development in cloned Virtual PC environments so all developers have identical setups. That's all good, managing dependencies is easy, however building the solution is horribly slow. Virtual PC can only utilize one CPU so I'm really only using half of my computers resources.

It takes a full 3 minutes from build to a complete page load.. and it's getting worse every day as the projects grow. Fixing simple things is starting to take a long time and personally, I'm getting frustrated waiting all the time as I can't really work while the computer is compiling.

Is there any way of distributing my build across several computers to speed up the build process?

Would an SSD noticeably improve upon my build times?

Are there any other way of speeding up the build?

Note: I have tried precompiling static dependencies with ngen but later read that ASP.NET does not support ngen. I use Visual Studio 2008 and there is no antivirus software present in the virtual environment.

Answer 1

You can greatly reduce the time you wait for a build with ASP.NET by doing the following:

• Use the new "optimizeCompilations" flag. It will tell .NET to not rebuild the entire project just because you changed one project/dll. If you have 40 projects and you don't use this, every time you change a simple method in one project, .NET will try to compile all other projects and dlls. With the new flag (plus the installation of a hotfix) you will see a lot of increase overall performance during development.