DotNetNuke load time is too slow for testing? A quick fix.

A common scenario in DNN module development, or any .NET development whatsoever, is the develop-recompile-test cycle. 

If you haven't noticed, after recompiling and deploying the DLLs to /bin folder, an ASP.NET web  application will reload every module from /bin. This will be slow if the size of /bin is large. Loading the site with debugger attached will increase load times even more.  

By default, DNN 4.9.0 has about 3MB of DLLs in /bin which is ok.

In our case, we had about 70MB in /bin. This is too slow for development. It took more than a minute in my dev machine to start the site without debugger.

The fix is to keep two /bin folders, one for single module development and one for testing the whole application. Even then, you can end up with a large /bin. For example, the latest Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX takes about 13MB minimum.