[maxlybbert]

I was working on adding unusual steps to the build. Things like "run the Protocol Buffers compiler on these files" (which, in the end, I just did through a batch file), and making sure the solution could be built on our CI server (at the time, that was Cruise Control but we eventually switched to Jenkins). It was no worse than Apache Ant in my experience (but I'm no fan of Apache Ant).

The project I worked on was relatively new. Another project had been started in Visual C++ 6 and upgraded multiple times over the years. Occasionally, somebody would go through the solution file and project files to see if we were doing silly things because of this evolution (e.g., defining rules that weren't ever used). And we had two or three ways of setting paths so that developers could check out the code and build without worrying too much. Especially when it came to projects that needed DLLs from other solutions.

We were able to reduce the amount of annoying things to a tolerable level. I believe they moved to something like NuGet (for some things) after I switched jobs.