If you are writing C++ with Visual Studio, and your builds take longer than you would like, you should try IncrediBuild. It’s a distributed build tool that just drops in to the Visual Studio environment. Worker machines are enlisted to help with the compilation, and the results are collected back on your machine. We’re trying it at work, and it isn’t quite automatic (there seems to be some fiddliness with projects involving IDL files producing TLB files to be included in RC files), but it’s close. They’ve got a whizzy graphical view of the build being spread across a number of machines, and they don’t even require Visual Studio to be installed on the worker machines. Magic.