If you do ASP.NET development on a daily basis, you know that any change in bin, App_Code folder as well global.asax invalidates all compiled assemblies and initiates a full recompile. This can be very tedious process, especially if you are changing these files a lot during development.

Microsoft introduces a new web.config setting that prevents full recompile in such situations. The setting is added through a QFE (patch) to Windows XP and Windows 2003, Vista and Windows 2008, and is included in Windows 7 by default.

You can enable this optimized setting by the following section:

<compilation optimizeCompilations=”true”>

Read the complete article to find out the possible issues you may run into.

I wouldn’t recommend this setting for production web sites as it can introduce runtime errors. Even if you web site is so big that it takes 10 min to recompile it all, chances that you are running in web farm environment are pretty big these days. Shutting down one of the web farm servers until the compilation process completes, shouldn’t be such an issue. After all how many times are you going to apply updates on the production server? In situations where you are not using your production server for staging and test environment, updates will be most probably applied once per week even less.

In development environment this switch can change your life. Again, keep in mind the possible implications caused by this setting as described in the article above.

Bonus tip: In ProPeople we are also using RAMDisk to redirect ASP.NET temporary files into it. This way all ASP.NET temporary files get created amazingly fast (in-memory) and greatly speeds up your debugging experience.