[zaphar]

Not really. When your build files are designed to be serialized IDE state no matter what the format you have limited your build system to what your IDE creators decided to express. This is not always what you need and that mismatch will only get more and more out of sync the longer your project lasts.

[ygra]

The current state is that the project files are MSBuild projects and Visual Studio itself supports only a subset of functionality (but leaves advanced things more or less alone). So the build system itself is quite a bit more capable of just what Visual Studio supports within the files and in many cases you can mix that quite freely.