[quote name='_moagstar_' timestamp='1312563910' post='4845087']
[quote name='Trienco' timestamp='1312558648' post='4845057']
Use multiple cores for compiling?

Yes

[/quote]

Actually, there is a difference between the two. VS2008 would use one process per project. VS2010 allows you to use multiple cores on a single project. At work, I have a large legacy C++ project that is part of the solution. Upgrading to 2010 on a quad core machine has drastically reduced the build time (from around 40 mins to 10 mins).
[/quote]
offtopic:
You might wanna look into Incredibuild and unity builds for your projects if you have build times that long

[quote name='ChaosEngine' timestamp='1312771060' post='4846026']
Actually, there is a difference between the two. VS2008 would use one process per project. VS2010 allows you to use multiple cores on a single project. At work, I have a large legacy C++ project that is part of the solution. Upgrading to 2010 on a quad core machine has drastically reduced the build time (from around 40 mins to 10 mins).

You're thinking of the /M option. You can also specify the number of processes for building multiple source files using /MP (which has also been available since 2008). It's certainly not unthinkable though that this feature has been improved for 2010.
[/quote]

My apologies, you are correct. For some reason I had confused 2005 with 2008.

offtopic:
You might wanna look into Incredibuild and unity builds for your projects if you have build times that long

I'm aware of both of these tools, but the infrequency of complete rebuilds makes it a pretty hard sell for those holding the purse strings.

[quote name='_moagstar_' timestamp='1312784743' post='4846072']
[quote name='ChaosEngine' timestamp='1312771060' post='4846026']
Actually, there is a difference between the two. VS2008 would use one process per project. VS2010 allows you to use multiple cores on a single project. At work, I have a large legacy C++ project that is part of the solution. Upgrading to 2010 on a quad core machine has drastically reduced the build time (from around 40 mins to 10 mins).

You're thinking of the /M option. You can also specify the number of processes for building multiple source files using /MP (which has also been available since 2008). It's certainly not unthinkable though that this feature has been improved for 2010.
[/quote]

My apologies, you are correct. For some reason I had confused 2005 with 2008.

offtopic:
You might wanna look into Incredibuild and unity builds for your projects if you have build times that long

I'm aware of both of these tools, but the infrequency of complete rebuilds makes it a pretty hard sell for those holding the purse strings.
[/quote]
Unity builds are free though, well they do need some programmer time to setup in the beginning but compiling within 3 minutes where it took 40 before should earn that time back quickly.

Proper 64-bit compiling is supported since VS 2005 actually and it was that SDK that introduced it not the latest one.

VC++ 2005 Express users could download the 64 bit compilers with the Windows SDK and use them from the command line. The IDE didn't support 64 bit targets, you had to trick it into believing it was using the 32 bit compilers to make it work.
VC++ 2008 Express put a stop to these tricks and forced people to use the command line if they wanted to compile 64 bit binaries.
VC++ 2010 Express is the first release that allows you to create x64 and Itanium build configurations directly - if you have the Windows SDK for .NET 4 installed.

Note that I'm talking about the Express editions of Visual Studio (both me and the poster I quoted explicitly mentioned this, too), not the full Visual Studio and not about the contents of the Windows SDK / ex Platform SDK.

[quote name='NightCreature83' timestamp='1312588032' post='4845276']Proper 64-bit compiling is supported since VS 2005 actually and it was that SDK that introduced it not the latest one.

VC++ 2005 Express users could download the 64 bit compilers with the Windows SDK and use them from the command line. The IDE didn't support 64 bit targets, you had to trick it into believing it was using the 32 bit compilers to make it work.
VC++ 2008 Express put a stop to these tricks and forced people to use the command line if they wanted to compile 64 bit binaries.
VC++ 2010 Express is the first release that allows you to create x64 and Itanium build configurations directly - if you have the Windows SDK for .NET 4 installed.

Note that I'm talking about the Express editions of Visual Studio (both me and the poster I quoted explicitly mentioned this, too), not the full Visual Studio and not about the contents of the Windows SDK / ex Platform SDK.
[/quote]
All the IDE does is invoke the command line compiler and linker, seeing that the 32-bits version of the compiler can compile 64-bits code it isn't hard to add an additional switch to the command line in the IDE, you can even safe this under a configuration called X64. The platform and configuration settings are just stored settings in the solution file that make it easy to switch between targets, all they do internally is change the commandline.

The same goes for the linker section where you specify \MACHINE:x64 and it will spit out a 64-bit executable.

Provided off course that the required platform SDK is installed.

Do not use VS2010 with 32-bit Windows XP unless you want the compiler to frequently hang, crash, generate internal compiler errors, or otherwise randomly piss you off.
Works great on 64-bit Windows 7 though, and one could argue that XP is the problem.

Odd - I'm using VS2010 Express on 32-bit XP on my work laptop and not had any problems of that sort. I used to have horrendous problems on an old laptop I had running Win7 with the issues you mention though.

Poll answer - Only two reasons I put up with the longer load times of 2010 over 2008 - intellisense is vastly improved and C++0x features.