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

As other people have noted, MSVS 2010 does indeed use multiple processes for compilation. Although, it does not automatically converts into heavily reduced compilation time. I have just made a test with a middle sized C++ project (around 200 files). It built faster on Dual Core at 3.4 Ghz than Quad Core at 2.8Ghz. Although Dual Core processor is cheaper. (Systems are practically identical with 4GiB DDR2 Ram each). I must note also, that during compilation Dual Core processor was loaded to 70% max. As you can see, if VS2010 can not fully load even 2 cores, what is the point of having 4 or more?