Incremental builds

[trailway]

I have Visual Build project which consists of a set of Visual Studio build steps. For the sake of argument, let's say that there are 3 steps which build DLLs such at 3 depends on 2 and 2 depends on 1. So... the steps are built in order 1, 2, 3 - no problem.

The thing that I want to do is to move to an incremental build process, i.e. only build if required. That is certainly possible using in Visual Build and Visual Studio. When a component builds what actually happens is that Visual Studio unregisters the previous component, builds it, and then reregisters it.

The problem I have is that the unregistration can fail. For example, if I change an interface in component 1 then when component 3 tries to unregister the previous version it will fail in Visual Studio. The failure can be overcome but it breaks my automated build process which is unacceptable.

I get errors like "c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Microsoft .Common.targets(928,9): error MSB3395: Cannot unregister assembly...".

I am thinking that the only option is to unregister everything at the start and then have an explicit register step after each Visual Studio step. That way I can be sure that the component is registered whether or not it built.

Am I in the weeds? Any suggestions?