Do you use regular builds as a coding tool?

Question

We have a large (about 580,000 loc) application which in Delphi 2006 builds (on my machine) in around 20 seconds. When you have build times in seconds, you tend to use the compiler as a tool. i.e. write a little code, build, write some more code and build some more etc etc As we move some of our stuff over to C#, does anyone have a comparison of how long something that size would take to build? I only have small apps and components at the moment, so can't really compare. If things are going to take a lot longer to build, then I may need to change my style! Or is my style just lazy?

For example, if I'm changing the interface of a method call, rather than do a full search on all the app to find out where I need to make changes to calls, I'll use the compiler to find them for me.

Answer 1

One thing you can take advantage of, especially in desktop apps, as I imagine you are dealing with coming from Delphi, is Edit and Continue. This lets you change actual code while you are running in debug mode. You can change just about anything, except for adding class level variables, methods, or new classes, and still continue running without having to recompile your project.

Answer 2

Well, compiler doesn't have to be that fast to take advantage of it. Some IDEs support incremental compilation on every file save, or either on-the-fly. This works great.

Answer 3

You can split application in several projects ( by layer and/or module and/or etc... ) and you will compile only project, where do you actualy work.

Answer 4

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 now has background compilation for C# (it's always had it for VB.NET). Back in my VB days, I often used this to find where something was referenced by changing the name and then seeing where the background compiler said there was an error.

I never worked on anything quite this large. At my last job we had about 60,000 loc spread over about 15 projects and it took about 10 seconds to compile. Maybe someone else can post a slightly larger case study

Answer 5

The last part of your post scares me. I am not familiar with other IDEs but MSDev allows you to find all references to a method - so you don't have to compile just to find all the method calls you broke.

Use whatever works, but it is good you are open to new ways of doing things.

Answer 6

I used to use the compiler as you describe, but since I've been using ReSharper I do this a lot less. Also, for things like rename, the refactoring support (both in Visual Studio 2005 upwards and, even better, from ReSharper) mean I don't have to do search + replace to rename things.

Answer 7

I use only the "Syntax Check" to see if I forgot some typo on the code... And these are much reduced, since I the "Code Proofreader" of GExperts plugin.