how does visual studio cancel a build?

Question

When you cancel a build in visual studio, what does it actually do? Does it throw away all the work it's done?

Let's say you made a change to a header file and a cpp file. The header change has caused a recompile of many files and towards the end you realize you made a mistake in the cpp.

At this point if you cancel the build and fix the cpp, will visual studio detect that it has already recompiled most of the solution to reflect the header change? Or will it assume that the entire build has been cancelled and throw out everything from that build?

Answer 1

Typically, translation units are compiled into obj files which are mashed together at the end into one or more lib, dll or exe. Canceling the build will stop the generation of objs, libs etcetera but will keep the ones already generated. MSVS is smart enough not to recompile those if you didn't change anything in those translation units.