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Comment by kreco | Hacker News Reader

While msbuild is powerful, I strongly believe it should have been a standard C# language build system instead of a XML-based one.

Any non-trivial thing to do is a pain to figure out if the documentation is not extensive enough.

I really love C#, but msbuild is one of the weak links to me, almost everything else is a joy to use.

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I completely agree that it shouldn’t be XML. Then again, I worked with Gradle in the past, which is based on Groovy syntax plus DSL. And that didn’t feel good either (though I must admit that I knew less about Gradle than I do about msbuild). Perhaps the problem of designing a good build system is harder than it seems.

You could check out FAKE. It’s pretty popular in the F# community. While not C#, the terser syntax may be beneficial for a build DSL and you still have access to .NET APIs.

https://fake.build/

But you augment it with tools written in c# which is best of both worlds. Builds are defined declaratively and custom actions are defined in code. Not the horrible hybrid of eg ant or cmake.

I remember using nant back in 2010 or so. Lol those were the days.

I've met teams that strongly prefer Cake [1] and it seems well maintained.

Personally, I think there's too much baby in the MSBuild bathwater unfortunately and too much of the ecosystem is MSBuild to abandon it entirely. That said, I think MSBuild has improved a lot over the last few years. The Sdk-Style .csproj especially has been a great improvement that sanded a lot of rough edges.

[1] https://cakebuild.net/

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