[daigoba66]

I'm actually a little bit disappointed in the switch. The existing tooling around msbuild projects is great. The only "problem" is that by default Visual Studio adds item references each individual file instead.

Ideally the csproj file should rarely become modified. Talk to any team of more than 2 developers and they'll confirm that pain of dealing with mundane csproj conflicts.

As far as XML versus JSON, I really don't care at all since I don't intend on looking at them or modifying them every day.

[troygoode]

Agreed that individual item references is the primary evil for this file.

Now that they're rolling packages.json into the project file you'll be editing it more frequently than you might think. (Though most Microsoft ecosystem developers will likely prefer to use a GUI of some sort to do so.)