MSBuild is now open source on GitHub

This is its biggest failure. Like, if you use wildcards in a reference inside of MSBuild, Visual Studio (which just parses and loads MSBuild, not saving the semantics of the file) will happily turn those into a list of files and save the list, rather than the wildcard.

> Unfortunately, because of the all too common insistence of many .NET teams on being spoon-fed by Microsoft, a lot of projects stick with MSBuild for their entire end-to-end build process regardless, simply because they believe That Is How Microsoft Wants You To Do It.

This, however, is totally and completely unfair. People stick with MSBuild because there's no other option that works with Visual Studio. Whatever solution one uses must, must, must work with Visual Studio, or it simply won't get off the ground. This is why psake and FAKE are so underloved: because to actually Do Your Job, you need MSBuild, and those don't help with that pain point.

And that sucks. Maybe the kproj stuff will help. But while loads of issues with .NET come from that expectation of spoon-feeding from Microsoft, this really isn't one.

This is only true for .csproj and .sln files, which are managed by the Visual Studio GUI, and which I've said are a fair and appropriate use for MSBuild.

It is not true for more general-purpose build scripts, which in addition to building the solution also do things such as run tests, prepare reports, hack configuration files, create zip bundles, deploy upgrades, stop and start servers, and so on. For .proj files, all you get from Visual Studio is the XML editor. In theory, you also get IntelliSense; in practice, IntelliSense for MSBuild files is something of an afterthought, and nowhere near enough to make up for the horrible lack of readability and maintainability.

In any case, in most projects that I've worked on, the .proj files were not included in the solution itself and had to be edited separately. On at least one project I was ordered to rewrite perfectly good and easy to read Python build scripts in MSBuild gibberish for no reason other than "that is how Microsoft wants you to do things."

So, my issue with CMake is that I usually run into it with annoying academic projects, or other weird shit--that doesn't matter, but what does matter is that the code quality tends to correlate pretty well with my personal rage.

When I try to run it on Linux, sometimes it'll just fail because reasons (looking at you, player-stage five years ago). When I try to run it on Windows, I have to fiddle with settings, rerun it a few times, and only grudgingly will it emit a project and directory for me.

And what it does emit? Almost never a properly organized project. Usually a project with a name like "Project1" and some rando layout. Usually I can't even figure out what #defines are being set, because it's hidden away.

I'd much rather people just write simple Makefiles (it can be done!), and a few VS project files, and be done with it. CMake has never once, in the last five years, ever resulted in me looking up from my machine going "Man, that was such a good experience, I'm sure glad we have CMake!".

The JS ecosystem, as crackheaded as it is, is still not 1000th of 1% of the annoyance as dealing with C/C++ using CMake.

And to be fair, there are a couple of folks I trust who have had great success with it--and yet, I never seem to run into those projects when I need them.

Cool VR stuff by the way...hit me up if you'd like to BS about it sometime.