Build, Rebuild & Clean Solution: The Facts

Just out of curiosity, I thought, why Build, Rebuild & Clean Solution in Visual Studio IDE? Earlier, I thought if you use any one of them, i.e. Build & Rebuild, they would do the same thing! But still I thought of going through a few resources and once I got the differences I was staggered to find that I was wrong. :D

This is a very simple and basic fact, which every developer using VS should be aware of. I wanted to be aware of this before someone questions me on the same. I will be discussing their work and describing each as an Agent.

Let's first discuss about Build Solution.

:-
'Ctrl + Shift + B',

The short cut above is to build a solution. Now what does this Build agent do in the background!

The Build Agent,


This agent of the VS IDE does an incremental build. If you build your solution once, with some files changed, then it will build only those files which you have changed, without touching the files that are not even touched by you. :P

Moreover, if you are building the Solution once and then again doing a build, it will not again build the solution actually, as the agent finds no files that are changed!

We see the build result on the output window in the IDE.

Let's see a pictorial difference.


As you see in the above image, the dll of the project gets re-generated, as a file was modified under that project. Since my solution has a single project, it creates the dll of that only.


In the above image as we hit the Build, the Build is succeeded but shows '0 succeeded' i.e. there were no files modified, for which it did not create any dll.