Compiling Massive VB.NET Project

Question

To compile my current project, one exe with ~90,000 loc + ~100 DLL's it takes about a half hour or more depending on the speed of the workstation.

The build process is one of running devenv from Powershell scripts. This works very well with no problems.

The problem is that it is slow. I want to speed up this build process.

MSBuild (using VS-2005) is one option but there's a bug specifying icons to the vb compiler/linker on the command line such that it won't successfully link.

What other options are there to "make" VB.NET programs?

(Faster workstation is not an option.)

Answer 1

There's NAnt, and Cruisecontrol.NET for continuous build.

You mentioned that getting a faster PC is not an option, but how much memory do you have? 2GB should be the minimum for a developer machine. Also, using a fast 10K RPM hard disk makes a big difference.

Have you tried disabling any virus scanner during your build?

Answer 2

Do you absolutely have to compile the whole solution every time? With that many assemblies it seems unlikely that they all need to be built unless they actually change. If your solution is made up of multiple projects, you might consider creating multiple solutions in your build environment. One master solution could contain all the projects, another that includes the ones that change most often. You can then configure your build process to focus on the projects that have changed. Depending on the source control system you use, you may be able to query the system to determine which projects have changed since the last build, and only build those projects.

Answer 3

If you can, upgrade to the 3.5 version of MSBuild. It can build solution files, and enables support for multiprocessor support (or here if you need to host it yourself) enabling it to build projects in parallel.

The caveat is that you need to be using project references so it knows what to build.

Also, how long is it taking now? Have you looked at the CPU/Memory Usage (using something like PerfMon) to see if it is a bottleneck?

Answer 4

There's not much you can do to make the build process any faster short of adding more cores, CPU power, and memory to your machine, but that isn't an option in your case.

Most large projects are not self-contained in a single EXE. More often, logical units are moved into seperate assemblies, which can either be a DLL or EXE. The end result is a whole bunch of little assemblies, instead of one enormous one.

To cite one example, one project that I worked on was enormous, consisting of 700+ forms and 10s of 1000s of classes. Functionally related forms, such as those related to printing, report generation, user interrogation, etc were self-contained in their own EXEs. If I was working on the reports, I'd exclude all projects not related to reports from the build process, and this helps bring the compilation time down from a half hour to a few seconds.

This programming style can be tricky, but when it done right, it simply works and works flawlessly.

Answer 5

If you have a big number of projects then you should try to reduce them. You can always split them up in dll's later. The fewer projects the faster it can build. Especially if it has to build them in a certain order.

Breaking them in smaller solutions is also an option.