 <p>MSBuild (which VS uses to do builds, from 2005/.NET2) supports parallel builds. By default VS will set the maximum degree of parallelism to your number of processors. Use Tools | Options | Projects and Solutions | Build and Run to override this default.</p> <p>Of course any one build might have more limited (or no) capacity to allow parallel builds. E.g. only one assembly in a solution provides no scope to build in parallel. Equally a large number of assemblies with lots of dependencies might block parallelism (A depends on B, C depends on A&amp;B, D depends on C has no scope for parallel builds).</p> <p>(NB. for C++, in VS 2005 &amp; 2008 uses its own build system, in 2010 C++ will also be built with MSBuild.)</p>