Visual Studio gives developers two primary options when in comes to compilation: Build and Rebuild. Build looks at modification dates and compiles only those things that have changed or have had their dependencies change. Rebuild ignores this and just compiles everything. Build is allegedly faster, because it can potentially skip a lot of work. There's only one problem with this: Every now and then it completely screws up and either produces incorrect output or fails to compile. Strangely, I have a problem with this.

I long ago lost track of the number of times team members have had a problem with their build (generally because they got the latest version which involves my code and therefore me) where the only thing I need to do to get everything working is Rebuild All (generally prefaced by a Clean All to assuage my paranoia).

Today's quick tip is therefore: Prefer Rebuild or Rebuild All. The time savings from avoiding build errors will outweigh your additional compile times in most cases.*

*Unless you have a ridiculously long build, which may be indicative of other issues.

Quick tips come with no warranty of any kind.