[john_reel]

Maven, Ant, and Gradle are also in a class of their own. They help making building Java apps universally extremely easy. C# has an annoying amount of complexity in this area, with a lot of things being built into Visual Studio, and therefore Windows only. “Visual Studio” isn’t a fun build system if you’re not on Windows. And compiling people’s libraries from random repositories over github, bitbucket, etc., only to find that it won’t compile because it relies on some old version of a library that you can’t find online and the newer versions aren’t compatible.

[flukus]

Nuget solves the dependency issue. MSBuild has switching from part of the framework to VS to framework to open source. On other platforms there was always csc to compile programs (which is dramatically faster), something missing from the new dotnetcore.

There was also nant and a number of build tools, plus good old make.

[Pxtl]

Ms is working on this, but it's been slowed by politics. There was an alternative msbuild file called json.project that was happening, but it's since been deprecated in favour of strippinh down the old . csproj format to its bare minimum and cleaning it up for sanity.

[Kipters]

They also open sourced MSBuild