[MaulingMonkey]

> I recently had to spend a lot of time with csproj files. They look and behave rather a lot like Ant/Maven. This is not a point in their favor.

Perhaps not, but it's glorious compared to, say, .xcodeproj.

Combined with .props files (same format as .csproj), managing .vcxproj s (also the same format as .csproj), to manage a build matrix of ~5 platforms x ~7 build configurations x ~20 projects via a few hundred .props files hasn't been that bad.

> XML is an extremely verbose syntax to have to deal with.

Easy to parse, though, if you want to automate keeping it in sync with other formats.

> As long as you stay in VS you won't really notice. As soon as you leave though its no longer comfortable.

The longer I use them the more often I drop down to simply firing up a text editor to edit my .props files. Configuring through the IDE is a great way to add a whole bunch of state which you may or may not have meant to set, and can get quite unwieldy... whereas I can see everything at a glance that a single .props file configures by simply opening it up.

At this point I have our .vcxproj file lists almost entirely decoupled from the .props build settings. Fewer merges, and each .props file is quite easy to digest at a glance.

[ygra]

I've redone the build system at work completely half a year ago, as some .vcxproj files have gone through a few upgrade processes since VC++ 6 projects. Needless to say there was a lot of cruft in there. You can do a lot of nice things by offloading configuration into property sheets and including them as needed and this more or less cut down the project files to a list of dependencies and a list of files. It also doesn't help to have add-ins that insert custom build rules for every file where each change to some configuration property changes about 50 points in the project file.

I think it comes down to: Auto-generated build files are always horrible to read; write them yourself once you know what you're doing. It's probably a bit worse with MSBuild projects as Visual Studio uses them as its native project format, whereas no one else tries that with Makefiles (for good reason, I guess).