Recover Computation Time Using Incredibuild

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Patience is a virtue, especially when building a process that takes too long. If you believe this, you have most likely waited for 10 to 15 minutes to finish a build. While waiting, you chat with someone or take a quick coffee break.

In my opinion, this is the norm for most developers. It is not until organizations or software engineers realize that wasted time has significantly impacted their bottom line that they look to find a solution to this.

Stronger Processing Power

Agile software teams have generally been feeling that they need more CPU cores as project codebases have been increasing across the board (which increases compilation time), and graphics needs have been becoming more complex, especially in games and apps that wish to incorporate AI and automotive data processing.

Due to these growing complexities, software engineers feel they need more CPU power to help them achieve faster builds. This is where Incredibuild comes into the picture, assisting companies in accelerating heavy workloads effectively and efficiently.

How to Use Incredibuild to Recover Time

Incredibuild is a software acceleration technology that allows us to build, test, and develop processes (e.g., static analysis, CI/CD makes), etc., to execute in parallel over a distributed network.

Incredibuild turns every machine into a supercomputer by offloading the workload to idle machines across the network even though they reside in your local machine with hundreds of cores and terabytes of memory. It automatically provisions such machines for you within seconds from available resources while minimizing cost and running the process 10x quicker.

For example, your compilation can run faster on a 200-core machine. Sounds cool, right?

This will significantly enhance and turbocharge your organization's dev cycles and iteration frequency. Moreover, it can substantially improve your product quality, lower time-to-market, and raise customer satisfaction—all the while dramatically reducing computing costs.

Suppose your organization decides to use Incredibuild. The question, "How much longer will it take to build?" would no longer be relevant because of the acceleration Incredibuild provides.

Incredibuild has a built-in elegant UI tool that replaces your old text output with an excellent graphical UI that transforms your build into a visual that helps you detect mid to long durations, errors, warnings, bottlenecks, and dependencies. But before we go to that, let’s learn how to install it.

How to Install Incredibuild

Once you have installed Visual Studio 2022 on your machine, you can launch the Visual Studio installer and check Incredibuild as an individual component.

Once installed, it will come with an Incredibuild submenu under the "Extensions" menu. Or you can visit Visual Studio Marketplace.

After a successful installation within Visual Studio, you can build using Incredibuild and monitor the displays while making. To start a build, navigate and click to the Extensions menu, and choose and click one of the build options, like Build Solution, Rebuild Solution, or Clean Solution.

Once a build has started via IncrediBuild, you can view the current form on the Build Monitor, navigate the 'View' menu, and choose 'Incredibuild Monitor'. You can also see this in your notification area.

Monitor UI Displays

In the last section, we saw how to install Incredibuild and navigate to it within the Visual Studio menus. In this section, let’s try to explore the build monitor UI.

Developers usually wait for their builds to finish and can’t visually see what’s happening behind the scenes. This is a big gap in our ability to assess what's going on. This visibility is the main idea behind Incredibuild's build monitor.

Incredibuild replaces your old text output window with an intuitive graphical UI where it guides you when there’s a related issue with the tool.

Let’s see what different UI displays it can give us when using this tool. First, the replay display allows developers to replay their build process and examine the build later on in the previous performance build. Next comes gaps detection. It identifies tasks related to specific issues with your build, such as durations, errors, warnings, related and unrelated dependencies, bottlenecks, etc.

The third one is the output window. I know developers are familiar with text output. This window shows you the usual text output. However, looking at your tasks will redirect you to the relevant and detailed output. Fourth, the project display allows you to see the project’s standard output with a status bar representing the project’s build status. Lastly, the summary display shows an overview of all the build information or situation, including the build time and license information.

Let’s see some UI displays below.

Output Display Window

Project Display

Summary Display

Summary

We have discussed where Incredibuild fits into the big picture of software development team issues. Next, we saw how to install Incredibuild within Visual Studio 2022. Lastly, we discussed how the build monitor UI can help developers navigate.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial as much as I enjoyed writing it. Stay tuned for more. Until next time, happy programming! Please don't forget to bookmark, like, and comment.