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Visual Studio - FastUpToDate warning

While working on updating a (very old) existing .NET application, I noticed the following message in the build output:

FastUpToDate: This project has enabled build acceleration, but not all referenced projects produce a reference assembly. Ensure projects producing the following outputs have the 'ProduceReferenceAssembly' MSBuild property set to 'true': 'C:\projects\Example.Data\bin\Debug\netstandard2.0\Example.Data.dll'. See https://aka.ms/vs-build-acceleration for more information. (Example.Business)

Build acceleration; that was a topic I had talked about before. It is a feature of Visual Studio that reduces the time required to build projects(as you already could have guessed).

Because the mentioned projects where targeting .NET Standard 2.0, some extra work is required to make build acceleration work. Before .NET 5 (including .NET Framework and .NET Standard), you should set ProduceReferenceAssembly to true in order to speed incremental builds.

So I updated my .csproj file with the following information:

After doing that the message disappeared and build acceleration seems to work as expected. Nice!

More information

Visual Studio Build Acceleration (bartwullems.blogspot.com)

project-system/docs/build-acceleration.md at main · dotnet/project-system (github.com)

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