asp.net - 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 multi core environments in all versions using parallelism, but that is not my question).

I am trying to decide on if i should get a higher clock dual core or a lower clock quad core, as i want to try and figure out which processor will give me the absolute best possible experience with Visual Studio 2010 or 2012 (v11) (ide and background compiler).

If they are running the most important section (background compiler and other ide tasks) in one core, then the core will get cut off quicker if running a quad core, especially if background compiler is the heaviest task, i would imagine this would be difficult to separate in more than one process, so even if it uses multi cores you might still be better off going for a higher clock CPU if the majority of the processing is still bound to occur in one core (i.e. the most significant part of the VS environment).

I am a VB programmer, they've made great performance improvements in 2010 and 2012, congrats (except for the horrid grey scale design and the uppercase everywhere), but I would love to be able to use VS seamlessly... anyone have any ideas? Also, I'm not too worried about solution load time, as I only code one project at a time.

Thanks.

Answer 1

MSBuild supports building projects in parallel. Visual Studio 2008 takes advantage of multiple processors to compile projects.