Visual Studio Smart Device Projects build slowly

If you are developing a smart device application using either Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, you may be experiencing extremely slow build times every time you make a code change. This can be very frustrating when all you want to do is continually build, deploy and debug. It is most likely that the slow build is being caused by the platform verification task (PVT), which is a post-build task that runs by default. More information can be found here on what the PVT is and why it is required. You can however disable it temporarily as it is not required to be run every time you build your smart device application.

To disable the PVT, you can perform the following steps.

1. Open the file %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.CompactFramework.Common.targets (if using Visual Studio 2005) or %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Microsoft.CompactFramework.Common.targets (if using Visual Studio 2008) for editing.
   
2. Go to the line which reads:
   

   ...
   

3. Change it to:
   

   ...
   

4. Add the SkipPlatformVerification environment variable to the system and set it to "true" (To re-enable Platform Verification set the environment variable to "false").
   
5. Restart Visual Studio for the changes to take effect (If building from the command line using MSBuild, add /p:SkipPlatformVerification=true to your command line to turn off the task. You can specify the variable in the project file also, so that this information is persisted across sessions).
   

Source: Visual Studio For Devices blog