Visual Studio Rebuilds unmodified projects

Question

So, as the title reads, I have a VS2010 solution with ~50 projects in it right now. If I make a change to a \"top level\" project that nothing references then VS still rebui

Answer 1

I've finally found one more culprit that I had hard time finding by increasing the build log verbosity.

In some cases, MSBuild looks for vc120.pdb in the output folder, and if this file doesn't exist, it will rebuild the entire project. This occurs even if you have disabled debug symbol generation.

The workaround here is to enable debug symbols and let this file get generated, then disable the setting again without deleting the PDB file.