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Visual Studio 2005 is very slow with a solution with 21 projects. Any ideas how to speed it up?
This question already has an answer here:
Visual Studio 2005 is very slow with a solution with 21 projects. Any ideas how to speed it up?
I don't have VS open in front of me right now...but its roughly this...
Go to..
Tools > options > Build and release options.
Select - build startup project and dependencies only.
This will significantly speed up the process.
There are a whole bunch of suggestions in this question: Very slow compile times on Visual Studio. A combination of a few of these will definitely help to some degree
a) Buy more memory b) Break up into different solutions c) Upgrade to VS 2008 d) http://geekswithblogs.net/Ahmed_Hussein_blog/archive/2007/11/12/116791.aspx
Here's some good tips on improving VS compile speed:
ScottGu has said hard drive speed is one of the most important factors in VS performance. When we got new computers at work recently I requested that they have a second top-of-the-line hard drive. My Development folder is on my D: drive and VS loads and compiles 20+ project solutions in a matter of seconds.
Upgrading to 2008 is worth it for your situation. At my last job, we had 50 projects, and VS 2005 was dog slow. Plus it was a pain to debug (w/ multithreading). The IDE kept blowing up on us. As soon as we upgraded to VS 2008, everything went faster, the compiles went faster (partially because MS implemented a smart parallelization algorithm by the looks of it), it uses less RAM, and is far more stable.
The only regret we had with 2008 is in the C++ end of things (most of our app was VB.Net, some C#, and some C++). The new version of C++ doesn't support Windows NT which we needed to do. The workaround is a postevent that uses an old Edit Bin and sets the version for 4.0.