why does blend suck at compiling?
Afraid I can’t answer your question, other than to say that there ought to be no difference: both VS and Blend make use of MSBuild to compile. I do have a gripe of my own, which is that Blend insists on building the whole solution, even though I typically have just one project that I’m changing in Blend – there’s no option to build a single project (like there is in VS).