Why isn’t anyone talking about parallel compilation for .Net

I'm becoming convinced that the primary reason this bit of information is considered important is tradition. In unmanaged environments, the disctinction between stack and heap is important and we have to manually allocate and delete the memory we use. Now, garbage collection takes care of the management, so they ignore that bit. I don't think the message has really gotten through that we don't have to care which type of memory is used either.

As Fede pointed out, Eric Lippert has some very interesting things to say about this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/ericlippert/the-truth-about-value-types.

In light of that information, you could adjust my first paragraph to basically read: "The reason people include this information and assume it is important is because of incorrect or incomplete information combined with needing this knowledge in the past."

For those who think it is still important for performance reasons: What actions would you take to move something from the heap to the stack if you did measure things and find out that it mattered? More likely, you'd find a completely different way of improving performance for the problem area.

You don't have to, but it is a good idea to build with the highest warning level. Why? Warnings are potential problems with your code - things you might have done wrong, badly or in a way that is likely to cause problems.

Turning on the warnings at the highest level will highlight these problems, allowing you to fix them early, rather than let them become potential bugs at a later date. Plus, you'll learn good programming practice as you compile - improving your coding as you go.

Edit: In Visual Studio 2010, you can change the warning level for a project by right-clicking on it, going to its properties page and then setting warning level to 4 on its Build tab. If you also tick 'Warnings as errors', any warnings will break your build - so you'll have to fix them.