By default, Edit and Continue relinks your program at the end of a debugging session to create an up-to-date executable.
Edit and Continue cannot relink your program if you are debugging it from a location other than the original build location. An error message (ENC1503) tells you that you need to rebuild manually.
Edit and Continue does not rebuild static libraries. If you make changes to a static library using Edit and Continue, you need to manually rebuild the library and relink applications using it.
Edit and Continue does not invoke custom build steps. If your program uses custom build steps, you may want to rebuild manually so that custom build steps can be invoked. In that case, you can disable relinking after Edit and Continue to ensure that you are prompted to manually rebuild.
To disable relinking after Edit and Continue
In addition, certain linker options disable Edit and Continue.