Most of programmers who are involved into development of more or less large project(s) know how annoying the process of compilation can be. There are some other things which are dependent on compilation, for example unit tests. TDD requires tests to execute fast, otherwise developers tend to run them rarely.The process of compilation of whole solution my team is working with takes about 5 minutes.  Our Visual Studio solution consists of many projects, so we usually don't have to recompile all of them. Normally, this 'partial' compilation requires about 2 minutes. It's easy to calculate that compiling the solution 10 times we lose 20+ minutes! The situation is even worse when we have to rebuild whole solution often. For this reason I unload a lot of projects manually very often but it scarcely helps.1. How can we accelerate the process of compilation?2. Can you recommend any Visual Studio [2010] extension which allows continuous background solution compilation?
How can I organize fast and comfortable solution compilation in VS 2010?
tools;tdd;visual studio 2010;optimization;compiling
The most effective technique that I know of is to build referenced projects into compiled assemblies, so that you're only compiling the project you're currently working on, and not a dozen others.Yes, you do lose access to the source code for those assemblies, but presumably they're not changing every five minutes, and presumably someone else is working on that code, not you.  When a new revision for that assembly gets released, you can simply copy it over to your project/solution.