Visual studio keeps building everything

Question

I have a large sln with many project.

I just made a change in project A and it build 9 other projects that project A references, but that had no code change.

Anyone know of any tricks to speed this process up?

Answer 1

selecting 'build only' when right-clicking the project A should do the trick. Not sure if there is a way to keep it from building referenced projects as well when building the solution (which is what the standard 'build' command does)

Answer 2

Make sure your project dependencies are correct. Right click on the project and go to "Project Dependencies." Make sure that each project only depends on the minimal set of other projects that are needed to link.

Answer 3

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.