Just a quick shout out for Resharper’s new build and run feature. I’ve become accustomed to Resharper slowing my machine up as it endlessly loads a variety of caches and processes. Speaking as a member of the slower development machine community it is a delight to see a new feature that actually speed things up and increases productivity even on less than optimal machines. Build and run uses some heuristics (i.e. clever workings out) to analyse which projects actually need to be built then only builds these. On first build you don’t notice much of a difference but on subsequent build it makes for dramatic increases of speed. It’s impressive and a real benefit.

I won’t bore too much with my current slow machined troubles but I currently a home based contractor working on a mid range laptop – I anticipated this laptop to be used for some lightweight home development projects. Inside it’s running 2 Visual Studio instances with 35 and 12 projects each respectively. Really it can’t cope – except it suddenly can using Build and Run. 5 minutes build times have become 10 second affairs. It’s not too much to say that it has been a bit of a life (job) saver.

Of course the real solution is to buy a better machine. But as I find myself in a new, more expensive country funds are a little short right now. So until I spring for a new laptop, Resharper Build and Run is keeping me afloat. Thanks guys.

EDIT

I’ve actually now done the decent thing and upgraded my laptop to use a 500GB SSD disc and popped in some extra RAM while I was at it. It runs like a dream. I close down and reopen Visual Studio now just for the fun of it – takes seconds. I still like Resharper Build and Run though, but it’s now less critical to my health and well being.