I use VS2008 for C++ and VS2012 for .NET. I upgraded our C++ projects to VS2012 as a proof-of-concept and build times went from 5 minutes to 15. Our projects a

I use VS2008 for C++ and VS2012 for .NET. I upgraded our C++ projects to VS2012 as a proof-of-concept and build times went from 5 minutes to 15. Our projects aren't particularly great, virtually everything is in stdafx.h directly or indirectly and small changes results in rebuilding. The increase in build time would have hurt us. VS2013 is a bit faster (~10 minutes, last time I checked) but still a bit of a hit. Allegedly this is due to the extra time parsing the C++11 language bits. I don't think this is a huge deal (our code should be better), rather something to bear in mind. Also, if you recreate your project instead of upgrading it you'll end up with a default instruction set of SSE2 (instead of SSE) and your exe will suddenly not run on Athlon XP-era chips. Upgrading is not something to be done lightly.