.NET Answers

When you make changes to your web site, even just changing the web.config file, you can end up recompiling the entire web site.  This can be a huge problem when you are developing a large web site.

A feature that we have available to us in VS 2005/2008 allows us to turn off the recompile on run, which can significantly speed up the development process.

To turn off the recompile on run, right click the Project branch in solution explorer and select “Property Pages” from the menu.

In the resulting dialog, select “Build” from the list on the left.

In the “Before running startup page:” dropdown, select, “Build Page” or, “No Build”

Now, when you run the application, the browser will start right up.

Why does this work?

The Build on startup only verifies your code, it really has no impact on the resulting code.  ASP.NET code gets compiled on the fly when a page is accessed.  So, most of the time, especially on an established project, the build on startup is just wasting time.

If you ever get to a point where you really need to build prior to running, maybe to find some errors in your syntax, you can always trigger the build manually from the menu.

Turning this feature on will significantly speed the development of a DotNetNuke module since we have to build the entire DNN site if we have it turned on.