Thursday, May 01, 2008
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All my concurrent dreams are coming true, concurrently!

First I had some early success getting concurrent unit testing working, details are forthcoming.  I did just have a new son so I'm behind on publishing the latest research.  Next, Scott Hanselman answers my call for concurrent builds here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ScottHanselman/~3/277248176/FasterBuildsWithMSBuildUsingParallelBuildsAndMulticoreCPUs.aspx

There is an old Channel 9 video where the MSBuild team talks about concurrent builds.  http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=219308  You will note that they decided on a Tree Based Scheme to manage the dependencies between build targets.  I guess I'm not so Crazy After All, am I?  My problem with the MSBuild concurrency is that it wasn't working in Visual Studio and I felt it should be enabled inside Visual Studio by default, since developers spend a lot of time building solutions using CTRL+SHIFT+B.  Scott has answered this concern here:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HackParallelMSBuildsFromWithinTheVisualStudioIDE.aspx

It's a hack as he points out, but we're getting there.  Ideally this would be made available in a Service Pack to VS2008, but I suspect we'll be waiting until the next version unfortunately.