After successfully following Michael Washington's tutorial on building a module with LINQ to SQL, I installed a 90-day evaluation version of Visual Studio 2008 Pro and began designing and implementing my own module in C# using the principles he outlines.

As I discovered more about LINQ and VS2008 the design and coding went fine but since upgrading from VS2005 Pro, which built DNN without any problems, I am now experiencing extermely slow build times with VS2008 and wondered if anyone else has a similar problem? Task Manager shows vbc.exe to be consuming almost all the CPU time (65-95%). I have seen a few postings around the net which imply that other people may have some issues like this. The build seemed to be stuck sometimes for 10 minutes at a time (yes, ten minutes!!)  on validating web site or on a single line of the build before moving on. Often the build fails when some later step times out.

My build machine is an Intel Celeron 3.06GHz with 2GB of RAM. Admittedly the Celeron is not noted for high performance, and perhaps its a bit long in the tooth now? However, its not that slow normally and I would have thought 2GB of memory would have been sufficient for what I'm trying to do. As i said, VS2005 was able to build DNN regularly with acceptable performance. The machine typically handles Photoshop and large spreadsheets without any problems and with memory to spare.

Do I need to get a faster machine now, do you think? If so, what would you recommend as a minimum-spec machine for developing modules for DNN?

Has anyone experienced these performance issues with building with VS2008? If so, have you found a solution that speeds up the build time? I know I'm recommended not to use the full source install of DNN for module development, but as I say, with VS2005 it was not an issue.

Steve Taylor

First off - stop rebuilding or recompilling DNN - there is absolutily not need to do so if you are making a MODULE.

Also since Michael's tutorial is based on a Dynamic module - and assuming yours is as well there is actually no need to BUILD or REBUILD anything.

Set the project build option to either No Build or Build Current - there is not need to do anything else.
If you are setup this way - then all you should need to do is hit debug to launch your website and it should be all but instant.

ALSO - you dont need VS2008 pro to build modules --  VS2008 Web Express is perfectly fine for building Dynamic Modules and is
actually faster at doing so in many cases because its not where near as resource heavy as the PRO version.

If you want to make WAP based modules - you can also use VS2008 Web Express - but you will first need to install the BETA version
of Service Pack 1 for VS2008 as this upgrade Web Express to include the ability to maked compiled projects.

As a side bonus the service pack also has a number of performance speedups as well

Westa

I don't think it is your machine, just the nature of the beast.  Anytime you edit file that affects GAC (e.g. edit something in app_code folder) the whole site gets recompiled and reloaded. I try to test changes out in code-behind before putting them in app_code which triggers the rebuild. If there is better approach I would like to hear about it.