[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman]
The Guidance Automation Extensions Toolkit (see GAX Toolkit) gives you this lovely message when you use the "Quick Register" action in your GAX package development. It's true that it can take a while, although it's substantially quicker than the full registration action.
When you're in development though, solutions using your GAX package will read the contents from the project's bin\Debug, so you may not need to re-register between builds at all. Experiments with registration types suggest that they need to be used in the following situations:
- Full Register – needed the first time you register the package, and may be needed following an Unregister if the package has been corrupted or isn't functioning as expected. Takes several minutes and does a variety of interesting things (check Task Manager while it's running); builds the solution and validates package XML before deploying.
- Quick Register – may take a while, but usually in the order of tens of seconds rather than minutes. Also builds the solution and validates the package XML, but doesn't do the full suite of registration tasks. Not necessary in normal use, although if you've modified the XML it's worth having it validated before trying to use it.
- No registration – in dev, the package is read from bin\Debug, so if you're adding or modifying templates, you can just rebuild and they'll be immediately available. Similarly if you change or add to the code in the project or dependencies, close any solutions using the GAX package and rebuild and the changes will take effect when you re-open. Interestingly, if you modify the XML – e.g. to add a new action – you can also just rebuild and not register, and the new action will be listed when you open a solution using the package. If not, disable then re-enable the package, and the new action should appear.
Obviously this only applies in dev, and if you deploy your GAX package using the MSI, you'll need to redeploy in full for changes to take effect. Useful to know though, and may mean your GAX development takes less of a while.