- How MSBuild Incremental Build Works
- MSBuild's incremental build mechanism allows targets to be skipped when their outputs are already up to date, dramatically reducing build times on subsequent runs.
- Targets with
- Inputs
- and
- Outputs
- attributes
-
- MSBuild compares the timestamps of all files listed in
- Inputs
- against all files listed in
- Outputs
- . If every output file is newer than every input file, the target is skipped entirely.
- Without
- Inputs
- /
- Outputs
-
- The target runs every time the build is invoked. This is the default behavior and the most common cause of slow incremental builds.
- Incremental
- attribute on targets
-
- Targets can explicitly opt in or out of incremental behavior. Setting
- Incremental="false"
- forces the target to always run, even if
- Inputs
- and
- Outputs
- are specified.
- Timestamp-based comparison
- MSBuild uses file system timestamps (last write time) to determine staleness. It does not use content hashes. This means touching a file (updating its timestamp without changing content) will trigger a rebuild.
Target Name = " Transform " Inputs = " @(TransformFiles) " Outputs = " @(TransformFiles-'$(OutputPath)%(Filename).out') "
</ Target
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