Inside the Microsoft® Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build

Incremental Building

As products grow into giants, so do their build times. For a large code base, a build time of a few hours is not uncommon. Knowing this, there must be a way to ensure that only components that have changed, or depend on changed components, be built. This is accomplished through incremental building. Incremental building allows the MSBuild engine to determine which targets can be skipped, or even partially skipped. This then enables faster build times in most cases. In this section, we will discuss how you can take advantage of this in your own build scripts.

We have seen in target batching that the Output parameter of the Target element contains the batching statement. On the Target element there is also an Input parameter; ...