Why can't Visual Studio run on more than one c

Question

I'm running Visual Studio 2008 with the stuff-of-nightmares awful MS test framework. Trouble is that it's sending my CPU to 100% (well 25% on a quad-core).

My question is why can't Visual Studio run on more than one core? Surely M$ must have a sufficient handle on threading to get this to work.

Answer 1

The /MP flag is only for builds, we at least it is according to this msdn

Now I would love to be wrong about it, but im pretty sure its just for builds. Which of course is still very useful.

Answer 2

In case anyone comes across this old question, VS2012 introduced parallel builds as a standard feature. Quote from the article:

Visual Studio 2010 included an option for "maximum number of parallel project builds." Although there was no indication of any restriction, this IDE option only worked for C++ projects. Fortunately, this restriction no longer applies to Visual Studio 11. Rather, there's now full support for parallel builds in other languages as well. To view this, run a copy of Process Explorer at the same time a solution with numerous projects is building. You'll see that multiple MSBuild instances are created -- as many as specified in the "maximum number of parallel project builds."