Why is Visual Studio 2008 always rebuilding my whole project?

Question

I have a Visual Studio project with about 60 C++ source files. I can do a build, and it completes without errors. But if I immediately hit F7 again, it always re-compiles about

Answer 1

Most probably is a matter of dependencies.

Consider the following possibilities:

• If you have custom build tools defined for some of the files in your solution, make sure that the output property contains the right file name(s). If the output of the build tool doesn't correspond to the one(s) specified in the output file names, the builder will rebuild that file.

• If you have custom build events, check whether the output from those build events don't affect the dependencies of the files to be built.

• I had problems when trying, at post-build, to copy or move some of the output files to a build folder. The post build operations that affect the timestamp of the ouput files of the build process will determine rebuild each time.