.Net: Can we make contributing more friendly to dotnet part?

[dziedrius]

Trying to make couple contributions and couple observations:

1. I did not find instructions how to setup environment to run all needed tests. I probably can figure that out by reading code/debugging, but it would be nice to have all instructions in single place.
   Also would be nice to understand how much of integration tests is a must - for example if I've changed something in one connector, do I still have to setup access to all other providers, most of which are not free?

2. Feedback loop is very slow, not sure why. Using Rider as main IDE and even after slight changes affecting one-two projects, it takes forever to run the test, it might be related to next item.

3. To run build.cmd took I think ~2 hours to run on my i7-13700H (64GB RAM, using dev drive, etc.). Building was very very slow, going all 20 cores at full speed. It seems that DotnetFormatOnBuild is taking very much time in that, tests also were running forever.

Wondering if there's something could be done to make this more smooth.

[markwallace-microsoft]

Hi @dziedrius
we have discussed this with the team and agree we will provide some additional set up instructions.

Our team is using Visual Studio and build times are typically < 5 mins.

A few questions for you:

1. Are you performing a Release build by default?
2. Have you tried building from the command-line for comparison? The first build may be slow as packages are downloaded but subsequent builds should be pretty fast.

[dziedrius]

1. No, using Debug by default.
2. Yes, attaching below what I've found.

I've opened build.cmd and removed tests part, as that part is also slow, but can't block myself from work computer for a half day :)
So what left is:

@echo off
setlocal
cd "%~dp0"
dotnet build --configuration Release --interactive

Ran it with time measuring:

PS D:\src\semantic-kernel\dotnet> Measure-Command { .\build.cmd }


Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 22
Seconds           : 5
Milliseconds      : 813
Ticks             : 13258136118
TotalDays         : 0.0153450649513889
TotalHours        : 0.368281558833333
TotalMinutes      : 22.09689353
TotalSeconds      : 1325.8136118
TotalMilliseconds : 1325813.6118

22 minutes at full throttle, to the point where even browser is not responsive, meaning that I can't do anything meaningful with computer while it builds. I had suspicion, that dotnet format is the evil neighbor, hence went ahead and commented out in Directory.Build.Targets:

  <Target Name="DotnetFormatOnBuild" BeforeTargets="Build"
          Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == 'Release' AND '$(GITHUB_ACTIONS)' == '' ">
    <Message Text="Running dotnet format" Importance="high" />
    <Exec Command="dotnet format --no-restore -v diag $(ProjectFileName)" />
  </Target>

Ran again:

PS D:\src\semantic-kernel\dotnet> Measure-Command { .\build.cmd }


Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 2
Seconds           : 11
Milliseconds      : 217
Ticks             : 1312170112
TotalDays         : 0.00151871540740741
TotalHours        : 0.0364491697777778
TotalMinutes      : 2.18695018666667
TotalSeconds      : 131.2170112
TotalMilliseconds : 131217.0112

10x faster, 2 minutes I could wait :)
It is harder to measure in IDE changing for example single source file and running single unit test for it, but I guess story should be similar - dotnet format is slowing things down a lot.

Update: for unit tests dotnet format is not the cause, I've noticed there's condition to do it for release config only.

Without any changes, rerunning 1 test took 14s in build step:

Build with surface heuristics started at 18:15:19
Use build tool: C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\9.0.204\MSBuild.dll
CONSOLE: MSBuild version 17.13.25+b1feb5ea6 for .NET
CONSOLE: Build started 6/2/2025 6:15:24 PM.

4>------- Finished building project: Connectors.Amazon.UnitTests. Succeeded: True. Errors: 0. Warnings: 0
Build completed in 00:00:14.214

[markwallace-microsoft]

We would recommend not building for Release by default because that is much slower. Is there a reason you need to do this?