I would love to use makefiles and git submodules instead of this msbuild/nuget contraption. That would be way less sophisticated, but I would welcome it. msbuil

I would love to use makefiles and git submodules instead of this msbuild/nuget contraption. That would be way less sophisticated, but I would welcome it. msbuild seems like a good example of microsofts tendency to overengineer simple things. But sometimes its suprisingly simple. different build configuration are just strings stiched together like "x64|Debug", and then are are conditionals to that value. Msbuild it's kind of a CLR language, but you can't debug it. The xml sytax and the syntax you use in the attributes feels arkward but sometimes limited for no good reason. Is <Message Text="Backup files: @(Compile->'%(filename).bak')" /> what i would want, if I'm used to linq? No, not me. @ and % are not intuitive for me. I usually have to try out what works. Accessing members of objects is odd. Calling System.String.Format feels like I'm supposed to do it. Anything interesting has to be done with custom task, and these are hard to debug aswell. For example studio would unload the .dlls, so you have to close it every time. That thing feels like a classic turing tarpit. A very complicated turing tarpit. Then again, if your build should output a .nupkg, the whole infrastructure seems to be lacking. You are left alone doing things that seem like they should be part of a package manager. e.g. handling of the version number. The whole build system knows the build output, but you have to specify it by hand again, in a different file.