Unnecessary project rebuilds when unit testing in Visual Studio

Question

I know about this question (and answers), but despite trying all the suggested options I am still stuck.

I have a solution with multiple projects, but for this parti

Answer 1

I have worked around this problem by deleting the .pdb file in the \obj folder. It seems that visual studio is checking file modification time to decide if it should build or not the project (in your case ExampleProjectA) and the .cshtml is newer than the pdb. But when launching the build, project changes in .cshtml files are not triggering the .pdb rebuild, so the problem remains.

By deleting the .pdb in \obj folder (not in \bin as the file there is copied from \obj and would keep the old modification time) the modification time for the .pdb is newer than the .cshtml and the VS doesn't need to build the project before running the tests. Of course this only works until the next time you modify a .cshtml file, that's why I qualify it as just a workaround.

Answer 2

Check what version of Visual Studio 2013 you are using. Update 1 has a pretty big issue where it rebuilds everything. See: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/811112/unnecessary-solution-rebuild-on-each-test-run

Upgrading to Update 3 did the trick!

I'm not sure if Resharper could affect things as well. I suggest temporarily uninstalling it.

Answer 3

For my case the solution was to change the build action of a config file from "Copy always" to "Copy if newer". It took a while to find as I had to change the build output details to get the details about which file was causing the error, e.g.

Project 'xyz' is not up to date. Project item 'c:\my\path\web.config.dev' has 'Copy to Output Directory' attribute set to 'Copy always'.

From my experience it can also happen that different file names are shown when building multiple times, so make sure you have the right one and / or build again if the problem persists.

Also have a look at this question and its answers to find some more information.