I am using DX9/DX10 via SlimDX for a project, and am looking into ways of speeding up loading.
One of the slow-downs is loading the effect files. I am currently using Effect.FromString to load the effects.
I have looked through the documentation and on google, but I have found no way of precompiling effects for either DX9 or DX10.
The only slightly related articles are those of compiling individual shaders(pixel shader, vertex shader, etc), but it doesn't seem possible to recreate the effect after you compile the individual parts.

That is what I use currently, what I am looking for is a way of compiling it before running the game into some form of optimized binary form instead. It should speed up loading the effect.

[font=times new roman,times,serif]You can [color=#000000]pre-compile the effect file into a binary file using fxc.exe. To do this, add custom build rules to .fx files in your project.[/font]