Solution with over 100 projects takes over five minutes to build
.net, prism, project-management, visual-studio-2005, visual-studio-2008
Solution
Your question is a bit short on specifics, but I imagine the crashing is just a workstation resource issue more than anything. 100 projects isn't a problem in itself as long as there are good reasons for having that many, but by the time you get to over 10 projects, I would hope that you have some sort of management structure in place for them.
Do you really need to be building all 100 projects, all the time? You can switch off individual projects for building using the configuration manager, and you can create solution files with a subset of the total number of projects.
For example, we have 36 projects for one of the enterprise apps I work with. Along with that, we have multiple solution files and configurations designed to allow our devs to load only the projects and configuration that they need in order to work with given subcomponents of the application. In other words, they're only ever loading some subset of the 36 projects. Our build server takes care of putting everything together.
I suggest doing some analysis on your application and finding out what you can consolidate, and what you can partition into other solution files.
Problem
I have a solution with over 100 projects. It takes a long time to build, and sometimes Visual Studio crashes during the build. How can I deal with this issue and minimize the pain? Have we gone horribly, horribly wrong somewhere? Some background on the problem: We are using CAB with WPF, and each module has a ui assembly and a "server" assembly, which is really just a layer for the database. There is only one team, with about 5 developers. I don't know how many classes or how many lines of code.