[O____________O]

Correct, VS commandline calls MSBuild.

That seems like an inaccurate description of what's happening: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11932164/what-parameters-...

They're using MSBuild, they just don't know it.

Given the age of projects I've worked on, and that it's unclear whether MSBuild is involved in VS's C++ compilation, I don't think your assumption is correct.

[Negitivefrags]

Visual Studio changed to using MSBuild for C++ at the time when the project file extension changed from "vcproj" to "vcxproj".

The change was explicitly to make it so that a C++ project file was an MSBuild script.

Visual Studio absolutely uses MSBuild for C++ projects.