For what it is worth, if your builds are more CPU-bound than you thought then either your solution is very small overall (which I somewhat doubt) or you have it broken up across too many projects. For a good nine years now almost all .net and vs.net -related build slowness has been due primarily to high project count. A bit of solution restructuring should do the trick nicely for you. Merge some projects and/or shift off some less-frequently-modified projects into separate solutions, cook up some official builds of them, and then bring them back in as binary dependencies.