MSBuild & TeamBuild - BuildInParallel failing because of MSB3021 file permission violation

Question

I maintain the build of a fairly large piece of software, consisting of roughly 350 csharp projects. Our build time for a debug built clocks in at about 17 minutes.

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Answer 1

The default targets that ship with MSBuild are designed for CopyLocal behavior - which is what VS relies on. CopyLocal is problematic when you're outputting to a single output directory.

To be able to truly build in parallel, you'll need to disable several CopyLocal specific behaviors in the Microsoft.*.Common.*.targets files. I've spoken with some folks in the MSBuild team in the past, and this is a particularly hairy thing to do. Even if you do blank-out some of the CopyLocal behavior, the VS test accessors don't behave well with build in parallel.

Some of the things you can start with:

1. Disable CopyLocal behavior for references by setting private to true.
2. Disable CopyLocal for CopyToOutputPath files when building dependent Projects.