It's no secret that the Visual C++ team at Microsoft shares its engineering talent with ISVs and large customers to help them get the most out of the company's development tools. From this work, in which the engineering teams truly see everything from the sublime to the ridiculous, they gather information about how to improve the products, enhance recommended best practices, and refine their own consulting capabilities.

Who better, then, to discuss which useful switches are most often forgotten or even completely overlooked? Ankit Asthana, a program manager, and Ayman Shoukry, a principal program manager lead  both from the Visual C++ team  offered their top nine underused switches. We've included them here with text adapted from Microsoft's documentation followed by the authors' commentary on the switches. Predictably, many of them focus on performance optimization (the first seven switches), while the last few target enhancements to the build cycle itself.  Ed.