How to fix visual studio 'projects out of date' message each time I run it

Question

I have a visual studio (2005) solution file with 70 projects.
Each time I press F5 to run it, it tells me that 4 of the projects are out of date, and asks me if I want to re

Answer 1

I would run a normal Build, twice in a row. The second time, I'd set the MSBUILD verbosity to "Normal" or higher (in Tools->Options, "Projects and Solutions", "Build and Run". I'd read the output carefully to see what gets actually built the second time.

In fact, now that I think of it, if this really is a cycle, then some part of what gets built the second time must be what's causing it to build the third time, etc. Perhaps you have a post-build step in one of the projects that touches an assembly or other resource used as input to an earlier step. With 70 projects in the solution, something like this would be easy to cause inadvertently, and hard to catch. You may have to learn enough about MSBUILD to be able to detect when one of its steps is deciding it needs to build because something changed, then to understand your solution well enough to know that nothing should have changed; then to see that something has changed that should not have changed.

When you're done with this exercise, you may have gained some insight that will enable you to help in breaking the solution into smaller solutions.