Visual Studio Builds Projects Every Time I Run

Question

I have a .NET solution in Visual Studio 2010 with a bunch of projects. Up until recently, when I would run the startup project from within the IDE, projects would only build if changes had been made to the code in either the startup project or one of the dependency projects.

About two weeks ago I noticed that every time I run the startup project, Visual Studio builds all projects, which takes about seven minutes. Needless to say this is taking a large amount of time out of my day, and I've tried my best to look online for solutions, but have yet to find any solutions that address my specific problem.

A few additional pieces of information - the same problem began happening to everyone else on my team around the same time that I began experiencing this issue.

We are also using a source code repository. Since we didn't change any settings in Visual Studio, my suspicion is that someone inadvertently changed something in the source code for some project that now requires all projects to build every time.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Go to Tools -> Options -> Project and Solutions -> Build and Run. Look at the options there. 'Only build startup projects and dependencies on Run' should be checked.

Additionally, you can set the build output (in the same options screen) to Detailed or Diagnostic to see if you can find any clues why the projects are built every time.