Report #54481 - VS.2008 (C++) often fully rebuild apparently without reason...

I have seen this behaviour for a long time (though only since||version 4) but I kept myself to report it because I always thought it was related to VS.2008 or to me inadvertently touching a critical file, triggering the unexpected full rebuild.

I still can't confirm what triggers this exactly, though when it happens, it happens once after the startup of the virtual machine. As if, sometimes, but most of the times, shutting down or booting the virtual machine (XP SP3) had a side effect either on the disk reads/writes or on file times. Some file time discrepancy on project or solution files like those storing the precompilation might indeed trigger such unexpected rebuilds.

Apparently my 4 co-workers do not see this behaviour, yet they have the very same setup (XP SP3, VS.2008 in a ||4 VM) and work on the very same project. They were upgraded from ||3 to ||4 after its release, while my VM was touched during ||4 beta.

Nothing terrible here, can live with this, even though that makes me lose 15 min (full build time) nearly every morning. Yet if someone from Parallels (or not) has any idea about this, I'd love to read about it here.

 

To clarify terminology

Build means compile and link only the source files that have changed since the last build, while Rebuild means compile and link all source files regardless of whether they changed or not. Build is the normal thing to do and is faster. Sometimes the versions of project target components can get out of sync and rebuild is necessary to make the build successful.

May be you are storing files on Shared Folders?