Speeding up builds in Visual Studio for .net CE

By Thomas Johnson | April 8, 2009

Finally I’ve found a way to reduce the compile time for the windows mobile app that I’m working on. The compile time reduced from around 50 seconds to less than 5!! This has certainly made my work more enjoyable and productive.

To do it you need to disable the Platform Verification Task. Just follow these steps.

  1. Edit %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\%latest version of framework%\Microsoft.CompactFramework.Common.Targets
  2. Find the line which reads: Name=”PlatformVerificationTask”>
  3. Change it to: Name=”PlatformVerificationTask” Condition=”false”
  4. Restart Visual Studio

You should be able to use an environmental variable in the condition but I couldn’t get that to work.

It sounds like it would pay to do the occasional build with platform verification on especially before doing a release.

Topics: Productivity |

3 Responses to “Speeding up builds in Visual Studio for .net CE”

  1. Ashwin
    8:55 pm on April 8th, 2009

    Awesome! If only it was that easy on other IDEs :(
    But man, a 50 second compile time is pretty ridiculous…how can you even concentrate working? I would be consistently on the internet every time I was compiling something for that long (therefore the compile times would be more like 5-10 mins).

  2. Thomas Johnson
    1:21 pm on April 13th, 2009

    It was definitely fairly painful but I think there are a lot of people out there working on really big projects that have to wait a lot longer than that.

  3. Matt Taylor
    10:23 pm on April 22nd, 2009

    Only 50 seconds, the CE app I’m working on can take anything from 2-5 minutes (then another minute to deploy) - defintely going to try this at work tomorrow, if it works, nice one Thomas!!

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