1. Home
  2. Accelerate your .NET build with Visual Studio 2022

Accelerate your .NET build with Visual Studio 2022

Accelerate your .NET build with Visual Studio 2022

Accelerate your .NET build with Visual Studio 2022

A little more than three months ago, Microsoft integrated a new functionality into Visual Studio 2022: Build Acceleration.

This mechanism, which can be optionally activated, apparently ensures that build times for .NET projects can be reduced by up to 80%. This is, of course, an announcement that I wanted to take a closer look at.

SDK Changes

This feature does not have to be activated in Visual Studio itself; it is activated via the SDK settings in the project file (*.csproj). In order not to define this in all projects individually, you can also store this option in the Directory.Build.props file, so that all projects of the solution receive this setting.

<Project>
    <PropertyGroup>
        <AccelerateBuildsInVisualStudio>true</AccelerateBuildsInVisualStudio>
    </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

Results

As a test for the speed changes, I am taking a current customer project that has about 130 projects in the solution. For this test, I have made a change to a central project so that not only a project but the reference tree has to be rebuilt.

Build without Acceleration

Without the Acceleration, all projects will be rebuilt.

========== Build: 128 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========
========== Build completed at 18:26 and took 16,637 seconds ==========

Build with Acceleration

With Acceleration, only the affected project is built and all other projects benefit from the new performance mechanism.

========== Build: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 127 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========
========== Build completed at 18:29 and took 01,182 seconds ==========
Visual Studio accelerated 20 project(s), copying 41 file(s). See https://aka.ms/vs-build-acceleration.

Conclusion

The speed benefits from the new Visual Studio Build Acceleration are enormous - and another reason to stay with Visual Studio. This feature makes our team much more productive over time.

Try it out!