I haven’t used Ubuntu much recently after switching several systems to Manjaro, but had to set up a laptop with XUbuntu 17.04. That came with Emacs 24.5 as the default emacs package, and as skeeto pointed out in the comments, with a separate emacs25 package for Emacs 25.1. I tend to run the latest release Emacs everywhere out of habit, so I revisited my build instructions to build a current Emacs on Ubuntu and its derivates. The good news is that in thanks to some changes in the Emacs build, the build is as straightforward as it used to be prior to the combination of Ubuntu 16.10 and Emacs 25.1. In other words, no need to remember to switch off PIE as was necessary when building GNU Emacs 25.1 on Ubuntu 16.10.

Check if you’re seeing the following output in the build pane:

InitializeBuildStatus:
  Creating ".unsuccessfulbuild" because "AlwaysCreate" was specified.

I’ve just fixed a bunch of these errors in one of our solutions here and all of these were caused by one of two issues:

• The project file referenced files that were no present in the source tree
• A custom build step either was supposed to generate a file but didn’t, or the file ended up in the wrong place

In order to find out if there are missing files that trigger the perma-rebuild, you’ll also have to enable Visual Studio’s debug output as described in this stackoverflow answer.

I’m currently busy porting a large native C++ project from VS2008 to VS2010 and one of the issues I keep running into was build times. The VS2008 build uses a distributed build system; Unfortunately the vendor doesn’t support VS2010 yet, so I couldn’t use the same infrastructure. In order to get a decent build speed, I started exploring MSBuild’s ability to build projects in parallel (which is fairly similar to VS2008’s ability to build projects in parallel) and the C++ compiler’s ability to make use of multiple processors/cores, aka the /MP switch.