Visual Studio keeps building everything

Question

I have a large .sln file with many projects.

I just made a change in project A and it builds nine other projects that project A references, but that had no code change.

Is there a trick to speed this process up?

Answer 1

Divide and conquer: Limit the amount of build time that goes on in your solution by creating additional solutions that contain logical subsets of projects you're working on. This limits your scope and will speed up builds.

See the The Partitioned Single Solution Model in this MSDN article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee817674.aspx

Key quote from the article:

Separate solution files allow you to work on smaller subsystems within your overall system 
but retain the key benefits of project references. Within each subsolution file, 
project references are used between constituent projects.

Answer 2

This happens when a project has a file that doesn't really exist.
The project can't determine if the file was changed (because it's not there) so it rebuilds.

Simply look at all the files in the project, and search for the one that doesn't have an expandable arrow near it.