Take the 2-minute tour ×

Anyone know an add-in or something that could give me the number of time spent on compiling during the day? I am interested to gather some data about the time I use Visual Studio to code and to compile. Any tips would be welcome too if no add-in exist.


I would need to have in the time all DLL loaded too by the ASP.Net webserver, not only those in the solution, what I mean is all those Output that looks like "'WebDev.WebServer2.exe' (Managed): Loaded 'c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\root\99145ad7\e9f1e7e6..." must be count in the statistic too.

share|improve this question
I did this recently by hand (recording compilation times over a day of work) to justify $369 spent on an SSD. Moving to SSD was worth every penny. –  cfeduke Nov 12 '09 at 19:17
I understand you :) –  Patrick Desjardins Nov 12 '09 at 19:23

2 Answers 2

up vote 1 down vote accepted

You can turn on build timing as a start... although you'd still have to add it up yourself.

C++: Tools->Options->Projects and Solutions->VC++ Project Settings->Build Timing

.NET: Tools->Options->Projects and Solutions->Build and Run->MSBuild project build output verbosity

share|improve this answer

I've just started using the Visual Studio plugin Build Monitor with very good results.

msbuild seems to give per-project build time when configured to give "detailed" output, but no summation of an entire solution's build time. This plugin does give the full solution build time.

Build Monitor also tracks the cumulative total time spent building during your current "session," which I would assume restarts when you restart Visual Studio.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


