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

Check your project's Program Database Filename setting. For some reason, if this is set to the name of a directory (such as "$(IntDir)\"), it can sometimes cause VS to rebuild your project every time, even if you're not generating PDB files (i.e. Debug Information Format is set to "Disabled").

This is a bug in VS2008; I have not yet reproduced it yet in VS2010, but my tests haven't been thorough, so I'm not confident saying that the behavior isn't present in VS2010.