Does the number of projects in a Visual Studio 9 solution impact the solution load and build times?

Question

I\'m specifically interested in solution load times & build times - does fewer solutions mean better performance?

Note that I\'m not referring to the perfor

Answer 1

I work on a project with a large number of projects, in the realm of 50-60, and I have found that the long load times are acceptable compared with the problems associated with developer lazyness / forgetfulnes.

Lots of the projects are dependent on base libraries, and thus need to be rebuilt when the base library is changed. As the projects can be in some flux at any given time, having developers only work on a subset means that if they are lazy they will not rebuild the entire application when an update is received from the CM tool. They can then spend a huge amount of time trying to fix things realizing why things are broken. This is all solved if the entire dependency tree is known by VS and a quick build-all can make it all work properly.

I realize that a excellent developer will know this and do it by default, but not everyone is great, and sometimes even the greats have off days.