Visual Studio Slow Compile with Silverlight

Question

I have been looking for a way to speed up compile time on my large Silverlight solution 110k code lines (around 500 xaml files). I have tried a number of methods already...

• Move to SSD and clean Windows install: only 4 sec faster build time.
• Set build to only build projects and dependencies on run: no effect.
• I have a 6 core AMD 3.3 Ghz all are set in parallel in build settings: no effect (on build never goes over 45% use)
• .net demon: made build time slower

System:

• Windows 7 64 bit

• 3.3 Ghz AMD 6 core

• 8 GB ram 500 GB HDD

• Visual studio 2010 Silverlight SDK 4

So right now my build time is around 70 sec, most of that time is used by ValidateXaml 45 sec. I am not sure what ValidateXaml is doing and my searches have come up null on this topic so far... Also it seems that anytime I make changes to even one file it rebuilds all 500 files not just the one I modified. Now 70 sec is not that bad but we have to build a lot in a day to check for errors in code at run time... so I spend more than an hour or more each day just waiting on VS to compile each time we make changes. So any improvement in performance would save me time. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You could try to move some code to a secondary library project in order to reuse the unmodified assembly and only compile the half that has been modified for local test, for TFS it will last the same time.