jonathanpeppers / formsbuildtime

File -> New Project to time a build

FormsBuildTime

A quick sample to show how setting DebugType=portable can improve Xamarin.Android build times on Windows. This is basically File->New Project of the Forms Master/Detail template. I didn't change any code in the project.

Here is what I did to reproduce this:

• Checked out a copy of xamarin-android/master/1826ec2 and built it on Windows msbuild Xamarin.Android.sln /t:Prepare then msbuild Xamarin.Android.sln
• Checked out this repo

Did the following steps w/ a default template:

git clean -dxf
msbuild FormsBuildTime.sln /t:Restore
../xamarin-android/bin/Debug/bin/xabuild.exe FormsBuildTime.sln /bl:DebugType_full.binlog

Then changed DebugType=portable, and repeated:

git clean -dxf
msbuild FormsBuildTime.sln /t:Restore
../xamarin-android/bin/Debug/bin/xabuild.exe FormsBuildTime.sln /bl:DebugType_portable.binlog

I committed my two binlog files in this repo for review.

Improvements

The _ConvertPdbFiles target gets skipped (as it should) when DebugType=portable. From this log it was taking ~3.8 seconds.

Overall the build when from 30.985s to 25.697s just by changing DebugType to portable. This is about a 5.2 second improvement for a default project.

What should we change?

1. VS 2017 for Windows could make templates default to DebugType=portable. There was once some concerns about VS 2015, but we support it no longer, right?

2. VS for Mac should also change their templates to match VS 2017, to support better build times on Windows. A user could create the project on Mac, and another user work on the same project on Windows. Build times will not be improved on Mac, however.