Had a similar issue, VS would hang for 45 or so seconds then build for 4 seconds and complete. The 45 seconds of hang would not produce any output to GUI and VS would hang.
Using ProcMon I could see 3 million+ file operations on the /packages/ folder via devenv.exe when I would build this project (and would continue for some time after)!! The first steps of the build you can see that it was checking EVERY PACKAGE to see if it needed to do a package restore (it did not).
Since I tend to blame NuGet for everything, I disabled NuGet Package Restore “allow NuGet to download missing packages” checkbox under Visual Studio -> Options -> Nuget Package Manager -> General. To my delight, the build was very fast. 5 seconds total!
Turns out that we had enable package restore on build enabled (I think this is on by default now in VS) AND we also had the packages checked into source control. It seems this causes TFS to thrash in some way… Checking for restoring packages must trigger TFS to do some source control operation checks.
FYI this was VS2013 UPDATE 4 – Nuget version: 2.8.50926.663, on a sln with NumberOfProjects = 38, but I could recreate this hang just building a single csproj with 2 dependencies.
Update:
Localhost “Rebuild All” on Sln with SccNumberOfProjects = 53 was taking 7:05 with 2 minutes of visual studio frozen / unresponsive
- down to 4:14 on a 2 core i5 with no freezing
- down to 2:44 on a 4 core i7
Also: This was on a machine with various file watcher security tools, likely not adding any speed to this whole process… and possibly to blame.
Update in 2021:
If you are looking for a paradigm shift, the new SDK style csproj format (see migration tool) + nuget PackageReference makes updates almost instant (< 20 SECONDS for same projects in scenarios above) – highly recommend you upgrade any legacy projects.
** Known incompatibility – website package references do not support static file references via nuget ( checkout LibMan)