Like I say, you can't do this from Visual Studio as the common/csharp targets files have specific checks that stop it working, but if you're just invoking msbui

Like I say, you can't do this from Visual Studio as the common/csharp targets files have specific checks that stop it working, but if you're just invoking msbuild on the command line then you can set the following properties: /p:CreateHardLinksForCopyFilesToOutputDirectoryIfPossible=true /p:CreateHardLinksForCopyAdditionalFilesIfPossible=true /p:CreateHardLinksForCopyLocalIfPossible=true /p:CreateHardLinksForPublishFilesIfPossible=true It will give you a considerable speed-up for very large solutions, especially if there are lots of common project dependencies, as it will make hard links instead of copying entire files. This could save you gigabytes of file copying in very large solutions. Google for "hard link" if you don't get what I mean by that. Note that dotnet core works differently and doesn't do copy local at every stage up the dependency tree when you build, instead copying dependencies directly into your top level application project only when you run the publish target, which is obviously cheaper than either approach.