What is the best way to improve ASP.NET/C# compilation speed?

Question

UPDATE: Focus your answers on hardware solutions please.

What hardware/tools/add-in are you using to improve ASP.NET compilation and first execution speed? We are looking at solid state hard drives to speed things up, but the prices are really high right now.

I have two 7200rpm harddrives in RAID 0 right now and I'm not satisfied with the performance anymore.

So my main question is what is the best cost effective way right now to improve ASP.NET compilation speed and overall development performance when you do a lot of debugging?

Scott Gu has a pretty good blog post about this, anyone has anything else to suggest?

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/01/tip-trick-hard-drive-speed-and-visual-studio-performance.aspx

Answer 1

One of the important things to do is keeping projects of not-so-often changed assemblies unloaded. When a change occurs, load it, compile and unload again. It makes huge differences in large solutions.

Answer 2

First make sure your that you are using Web Application Projects (WAP). In our experience, compared to Website Projects, WAP compiles roughly 10x faster.

Then, consider migrating all the logic (including complex UI components) into separate library projects. The C# compiler way faster than the ASP.NET compiler (at least for VS2005).

Answer 3

If you have lots of 3rd party "Referenced Assemblies" ensuring that CopyLocal=False on all projects except for the web application project makes quite a big difference.

I blogged about the perf increases I managed to get by making this simple change:

Speeding Up your Desktop Build - Part 1