[rnbennett]

You assume too much - disappointing. I was in the .NET world for 12-13 years and worked for MS at one point. I was hardly being 'forced' to use it - instead I was regularly brought in to come in and fix / re-architect others' awful messes.

We both know it's not right to load 34 projects into a solution. It's not something I'd ever do, but it's done by many. I saw it commonly in my clients. My last .NET project I took on about 18 months ago, my client had a Classic ASP/2.0/3.5 chimaera with 50+ solutions, each with up to 40 projects in each. DataSets calling SQL Server stored procs for a data layer. The build process took almost an hour.

It's common unfortunately. Big enterprise, old platform, cluster of code. I stopped using .NET because those enterprises have no desire to fix it.

[spongle]

Which is what I'm stuck with (I'm not junior staff either btw - been doing this lark for 26 years). We don't load all the projects at once.

This is actually the debugger failing to load all the symbols into the vshost process because of the memory ceiling being 3.5Gb for 32-bit processes rather than the IDE failing itself. Unfortunately due to poor isolation in VS, it takes out IIS Express and VS IDE.

Release binaries don't blow it but debug ones with pdbs do. This is a shit when your project is large with long dependency chains.