Datagrid Girl

178!

How long does that take to start up?

I usually don't have more than about 5 or so projects in a solution (e.g. Data, Service, Test, Web) and a solution for each "application". Though obviously that's not hard and fast.

I always reference projects. Make switching between release and debug within the solution easier.

Build on my own machine using VS.NET.

nAnt is used on a CI server (with Draco.NET).

There are 178 projects on the solution, but not all of them are loaded on the application startup, they are loaded as functionalities are invoked.
I estimate that roughly 20 of them are needed for the application startup, and it starts up on roughly 0.5s. I never measured it, but it’s clearly a sub-second process. Actually, monolithic designs are more often responsible for slow startup times than the inverse.
I’m a strong advocate of separate build machines. You're wasting expensive resources (programmers) while they manage & wait for a build, instead of doing what they're supposed to do: programming. They need to build only the subsystem and the unit tests of the code they’re working on, nothing more.
Not to mention the risks involved: just think about of what would happen if a developer machine gets infected by a virus.

I really hope this gets fixed in the next version. This bug is currently biting our company. Wish I could afford a MSDN subscription so I could check this out on the new version.

Hi Travis, in VS 2005, you don't actually have to use Solutions or Projects at all, which I think is pretty cool, though there are still some advantages to using them. Though it's currently only available for download for MSDN subscribers and alpha testers, MS is also handing out copies at some of the conferences, so if you can make it to one of those, that's another way to get a copy.

Marcie

Travis, just a little warning though. The March 2004 preview is horribly horribly horribly slow! It seems to be some sort of semi-debug build and you wouldn't be blamed for thinking it was a Java application or interpreted Basic :-)

Nish

Yes, certainly none of the pre-beta builds have been optimized for speed yet. Kinda makes more sense to do that after all the features have been built :)

Marcie