Asp – How to setup ASP.Net MVC solution for quickest build time

asp.net-mvctdd

I want to find the best setup for ASP.Net MVC projects to get the quickest code-build-run process in Visual Studio.

How can you set up your solution to achieve near zero second build times for small incremental changes?

If you have a test project, with dependencies on other projects in your solution, a build of the test project will still process the other projects even if they have not changed.
I'm don't think it is entirely rebuilding these projects but it is certainly processing them. When doing TDD you want an near zero second build time for your small incremental changes, not a 20 – 30 second delay.

Currently my approach is to reference the dll of a dependent project instead of referencing the project itself, but this has the side effect of requiring me to build these projects independently should I need to make a change there, then build my test project.

One small tip, if you use PostSharp, you can add the Conditional Compilation symbol SKIPPOSTSHARP to avoid rebuilding the aspects in your projects during unit testing. This works best if you create a separate build configuration for unit testing.

Best Answer

I like Onion architecture.

Solution should have ~3 projects only =>

Core
Infrastructure
UI

Put 2 more projects (or 1 and use something like nUnit categories to separate tests) =>

UnitTests
IntegrationTests

It's hard to trim down more. <= 5 projects aren't bad. And yeah - avoid project references.

Unloading unnecessary projects through VS might help too.

And most importantly - make sure your pc is not clogged up. :)

Anyway - that's just another trade off. In contrast to strongly typed languages - dynamic languages are more dependent on tests but it's faster and easier to write them.

Small tip - instead of rebuilding whole solution, rebuild selection only (Tools=>Options=>Keyboard=>Build.RebuildSelection). Map it to ctrl+shift+b. Original map remap to ctrl+shift+alt+b.

Related Solutions

Asp.net-mvc – Compile Views in ASP.NET MVC

From the readme word doc for RC1 (not indexed by google)

ASP.NET Compiler Post-Build Step

Currently, errors within a view file are not detected until run time. To let you detect these errors at compile time, ASP.NET MVC projects now include an MvcBuildViews property, which is disabled by default. To enable this property, open the project file and set the MvcBuildViews property to true, as shown in the following example:

<Project ToolsVersion="3.5" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
  </PropertyGroup>

Note Enabling this feature adds some overhead to the build time.

You can update projects that were created with previous releases of MVC to include build-time validation of views by performing the following steps:

Open the project file in a text editor.
Add the following element under the top-most <PropertyGroup> element: <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
At the end of the project file, uncomment the <Target Name="AfterBuild"> element and modify it to match the following:

<Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'">
    <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp" PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" />
</Target>

C# – How to create a dropdownlist from an enum in ASP.NET MVC

For MVC v5.1 use Html.EnumDropDownListFor

@Html.EnumDropDownListFor(
    x => x.YourEnumField,
    "Select My Type", 
    new { @class = "form-control" })

For MVC v5 use EnumHelper

@Html.DropDownList("MyType", 
   EnumHelper.GetSelectList(typeof(MyType)) , 
   "Select My Type", 
   new { @class = "form-control" })

For MVC 5 and lower

I rolled Rune's answer into an extension method:

namespace MyApp.Common
{
    public static class MyExtensions{
        public static SelectList ToSelectList<TEnum>(this TEnum enumObj)
            where TEnum : struct, IComparable, IFormattable, IConvertible
        {
            var values = from TEnum e in Enum.GetValues(typeof(TEnum))
                select new { Id = e, Name = e.ToString() };
            return new SelectList(values, "Id", "Name", enumObj);
        }
    }
}

This allows you to write:

ViewData["taskStatus"] = task.Status.ToSelectList();

by using MyApp.Common