Drafts of build scenario and persistent-problems docs

documentation/Build-Scenarios.md

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+# Build Scenarios and Major Users
+
+## Scenarios
+
+MSBuild is used in a huge variety of ways, each with its own behavioral and performance characteristics.
+
+### Batch builds
+
+The most straightforward invocation of MSBuild is a batch build--a direct invocation of `dotnet build` or `MSBuild.exe` on a project or set of projects. This can run from a clean state, requiring all tools to run as well as all of MSBuild's overhead computation.
+
+Depending on the size of the codebase, these builds are usually dominated by tool execution, such as the C# compiler. Other build tasks like `Copy` and ASP.NET static-asset handling are also often contributors.
+
+This scenario is critical for:
+
+* Clean repo checkout
+* CI/PR/Official builds (usually from clean though not always)
+
+### Incremental batch builds
+
+MSBuild tries to avoid doing unnecessary work when projects have already been built. It uses file input and output lists to avoid executing targets when possible. Unfortunately, checking whether a target is up to date still has costs, and the overhead of MSBuild evaluation can also be a major factor in incremental build performance.
+
+In the limit, a fully-up-to-date build is instructive for the MSBuild team, because an *ideal* fully up-to-date build would take no time to run. If you do `dotnet build && dotnet build`, any time spent in the second one should be overhead (barring an incrementality bug in the projects).
+
+This scenario is critical for:
+
+* Dev inner loop
+* Optimizing constant overhead
+
+### IDE load
+
+IDEs like Visual Studio and C# Dev Kit need to understand
+
+* What sources to parse and analyze
+* What build configurations exist
+* What compiler flags each configuration will set.
+
+Ideally, this would result in a model (to power IntelliSense completion, go-to-definition, and other editor tools) that *exactly* matches the way compilation will be executed in a batch build (and ideally a batch build that produces deployable bits). However, the IDE load scenario is extremely performance sensitive, since a repo or solution may contain hundreds of projects that need to be understood before the load (and editor functionality) is complete.
+
+Because MSBuild is so dynamic, the required information is generally extracted via a [design-time build](), which runs a subset of the build: ideally enough to generate the information required to run a compiler, but no more. Differences between design-time build and batch build can result in errors that are extremely confusing to the users (editor squiggles that don't show up in builds, or vice versa).
+
+### IDE build
+
+After projects are loaded into an IDE, the user may invoke a build directly or indirectly (for instance with a start-debugging command). These builds can differ from batch builds dramatically, since IDEs like Visual Studio may choose to build projects in isolation. This can be motivated by supporting non-MSBuild project types (as Visual Studio does), or by a desire to reduce IDE incremental build time by avoiding MSBuild overhead using [fast up-to-date checks]() that decide whether to invoke a project build based on a higher-order model of the project-level inputs and outputs.
+
+### Project-level caching
+
+Repos using MSBuild's project caching plugin system are [graph-based]() builds that consult the cache plugin before starting to build each project. The cache plugin can provide cached results for a project based on the state of the system or allow the build to continue (and possibly add results to a cache).
+
+Because the build is graph-based, graph-construction time (dominated by evaluation time) is a major factor for these builds when up to date or mostly cached.
+
+### Higher-order build systems
+
+MSBuild can be invoked as part of a higher-order build system like [CloudBuild]() or [BuildXL](). Generally in these cases the higher-order build system often constructs and walks the graph, making MSBuild evaluation and execution time (of only out-of-date projects) the critical path.
+
+## Major Users/Use Cases
+
+| User Scenario | Specific actions tied to this scenario |
+| - | - |
+| VS Evaluation | Initial load, solution switch, branch switch. Used to populate IDE data. Often a blocker to light up other IDE functionality. |
+| VS Solution Build | F5 debugging, running tests |
+| VS Design-time Build | Used to populate IDE functionality (right-click commands, views like the Dependencies node, etc) |
+| CLI Evaluation | Used by many core CLI Commands: build, publish, restore, clean, test, workload restore, run, package management, watch. Has large impact on dev inner loop at the CLI. Clients of these commands: aspire, azure dev CLI, VS Code |
+| MSBuild API-based Evaluation | dotnet run and other commands do multiple evaluations to get data to use. this increases cycle times. dotnet new console currently spends 2.8s doing the build: 2 evaluations, 440ms. 1 restore: 220ms. 1 build: 2.1 s. and then another 310ms evaluating the required data to run. |
+| CLI Run | used by: single-file feature in .NET 10, Aspire - once for the apphost, once for each referenced app project |
+| CLI Publish | used by: ci/cd pipelines, Aspire publishing, azd publishing |

documentation/Persistent-Problems.md

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+# Builds suck
+
+No build is ever fast enough, reliable enough, or does everything you want.
+
+MSBuild-driven builds are no exception.
+
+## Evaluation
+
+*Every* [batch build]() (absent a higher-order build system) must evaluate every project in the scope of the build. IDEs can cache evaluation and act as a higher-order builds sytem but important IDE scenarios like “first load after a repo clone” are dominated by evaluation.
+
+## ResolveAssemblyReferences
+
+When build is invoked, most targets can be skipped as up to date, but `ResolveAssemblyReferences` (RAR) and some of its prerequisites like `ResolvePackageAssets` cannot, because their role is to produced data used within the build to compute the compiler command line. Since they don't have concrete file outputs and their file inputs can be difficult to express (it’s the closure of all referenced assemblies), MSBuild's standard up-to-date check mechanisms can't apply.
+
+## Copy
+
+The amount of time spent copying files in a build can be surprising. Efficient copy-on-write filesystems can help dramatically (we now have this on all major operating systems via `clonefile` on [Linux]() and [macOS]() and the [Windows 11 24H2+ Dev Drive]()).
+
+As an implementation detail of MSBuild's common copies, the targets are generally not incremental, in favor of fine-grained incrementality within the Copy task itself. This means that Copy task time can be nonzero even on a fully up-to-date build.