When my colleague debugs a web application in his visual studio instance his output window streams all of the assemblies that are being compiled, (at least I believe that is what it's doing) but mine does not. I do see the text "Ready" flashing down in the status bar intermittently which I believe is something similar to what is being dumped to my colleagues output window. Does anyone know what switch I need to flip to get this working on my instance? Both of our output windows are configured to "show output from:" Debug. The reason I'm asking all of this is because this particularly smelly application I've been asked to help on takes something like two or three minutes for it to "spin up" before I actually see an explorer instance for this site and I was thinking that this output information might be able to help me figure out why it's taking so long to "spin up".
You want to make sure to use the Verbose (or something else more than Minimal) setting for build output. Then simply make sure your output window is open, and set the dropdown to "Build".
Tools->Options->Projects and Solutions->Build and Run->MSBuild project build output verbosity dropdown
Another thing I have noticed, when 'Building' a web site (as opposed to a web application), the build process takes a long time compared to the web application. I think the slow build speed is just a byproduct of how a web site is compiled, not the code itself.
Also, usually those dlls you see flashing in the ready field is the debug assemblies/symbol files/etc being loaded into the debugger and everything being attached to processes...
I figured out that if I right click in console area of the Output window when Show out from: "Debug" is selected that their are 6 different outputs available to select, several of them were not selected on my machine but they were selected on my colleagues machines, now I am receiving the Output I was looking for. As for other problem, I am now looking into it, looks like a lot of HttpCompileExceptions and NullReferenceExceptions are being thrown when "spinning up"... interesting, not sure if this is normal behavior or not.