Visual Studio and Virus Scan of Temp folder

Question

We are using Visual Studio 2008 as our primary development IDE. Our security team has set up McAfee to scan files in our \Local Settings\Temp folder. Unfortunately VS uses this directory during code builds which is slowing the developers down. We've reached an impasse with the security team on this, and wonder if anyone knows of a configuration setting in VS where we could change the folder to where those temporary files are written.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can write a batch file which overwrites the %TEMP% and %TMP% variables and then launches visual studio. When the batch file overwrites an enviorment variables it is applicable only for that session, it does not modify the %TEMP% for applications launched from other batch files / system directly.

Answer 2

Use the tempDirectory property of the compilation section in your web.config:

<compilation debug="true" tempDirectory="C:\Foo">

Make sure you give the ASPNET account write access to C:\Foo (or whichever account your ASP.NET worker process is running under - in my case it's a domain account).

As per: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.configuration.compilationsection.tempdirectory.aspx

Answer 3

If you are able to debug processes on the box then attaching a debugger to the virus scanner and forgetting to let it run after hitting the attach breakpoint would improve performance.

Answer 4

Maybe complain a lot that you need faster computers since the added security slows you down so much? Have hard facts ready (like "slower compile time costs me 60 minutes every day")
Usually when it comes around to spending money most businesses find other ways around a problem.

Answer 5

At my company, we go into the Services screen and set the on-access scanner to "disabled", which prevents it from starting at system boot (except when they push out an update, then you have to do it again). It's worth noting that you can temporarily disable it by clicking "stop", but it will periodically restart itself. Setting it to "disabled" prevents it from restarting. Improves performance 10X. To mitigate the risks of viruses, we are very vigilant about doing a full system scan periodically.

If you must live with the on-access scanner, I don't think a faster computer is what you need to ask for. In my experience, it's always the disk being accessed that's the bottleneck. Ask for solid-state disks and/or a striped RAID configuration. Of course, a few more cores never hurt anyone... especially with that much disk throughput, it might become necessary. but then you'd need more disk throughput. etc.