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MSBuild is a nightmare to debug if you end up writing even moderately complex MSBuild project files.

MSBuild is a nightmare to debug if you end up writing even moderately complex MSBuild project files. It doesn't help that VS has a completely different implementation of MSBuild which is subtly incompatible with the command-line MSBuild. Also, setting up proper dependency tracking, so that builds are incremental, is considered an "advanced topic", and is extremely difficult to get right in the presence of various kinds of generated files in the build. In these cases, it is much, much slower than a modern build tool like ninja. MSBuild being open source is going to save countless hours of building workarounds for bugs that have been acknowledged and gone unfixed, or debugging strange problems. I'm happy to see that it's happened, but would have been much happier had it happened a year ago and saved me months of build system hell.

Posted by tokenrove on Mar 19, 2015, 12:03 AM

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MSBuild is a nightmare to debug if you end up writing even moderately complex MSBuild project files.

tokenroveMar 19, 2015, 12:03 AM

MSBuild is a nightmare to debug if you end up writing even moderately complex MSBuild project files. It doesn't help that VS has a completely different implementation of MSBuild which is subtly incompatible with the command-line MSBuild. Also, setting up proper dependency tracking, so that builds are incremental, is considered an "advanced topic", and is extremely difficult to get right in the presence of various kinds of generated files in the build. In these cases, it is much, much slower than a modern build tool like ninja. MSBuild being open source is going to save countless hours of building workarounds for bugs that have been acknowledged and gone unfixed, or debugging strange problems. I'm happy to see that it's happened, but would have been much happier had it happened a year ago and saved me months of build system hell.

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