Was Visual Studio 2008, 2010 or 2012 (v11) written to use multi cores?

Question

Basically i want to know if the visual studio IDE and/or compiler in 2010 and 2012 was written to make use of a multi core environment (i understand we can target m

Answer 1

The question has been edited to mention VS2012, but most of answers date back to before that was released. VS2012 introduced parallel builds as a standard feature. So, there is better opportunity to easily utilize more cores on a capable CPU. However as previously mentioned, if you want short compile times a fast hard drive is essential, preferably a high end SSD.

There is some debate regarding whether the hard drive or the CPU is the better investment, but improving either should have a big impact. In most markets the cost of developer time far outweighs hardware costs so usually you are best off buying the best CPU and hard drive you can. The only thing to factor in is the law of diminishing returns at they very top end.

Quote from the article regarding parallel builds on VS2012:

Visual Studio 2010 included an option for "maximum number of parallel project builds." Although there was no indication of any restriction, this IDE option only worked for C++ projects. Fortunately, this restriction no longer applies to Visual Studio 11. Rather, there's now full support for parallel builds in other languages as well. To view this, run a copy of Process Explorer at the same time a solution with numerous projects is building. You'll see that multiple MSBuild instances are created -- as many as specified in the "maximum number of parallel project builds."