Visual Studio 2005 introduced support for doing parallel builds in solutions that contain more than one project. This is a great idea, especially on systems equipped with multi-core processors. Unfortunately, the developers at Microsoft apparently don't know how to program a multi-threaded application.

Suppose we're building two projects within one solution, call them Project A and Project B. If A and B exist in completely different folders, and are mutually exclusive in every way possible, the parallel build option is quite handy (improved build performance). However, if projects A and B share any code, any code at all, you run the risk of build failures. It seems as though Visual Studio doesn't lock files appropriately during the build process. So, if each instance of the compiler tries to build the same file at the same time, one of them will fall over and die, complaining that "no class instances were found."

It's shocking to me that something so seemingly simple could be broken in an application of this caliber.