[Derbasti]

- Visual Studio project files are XML files that are interpreted line by line, and can contain variables, branches, and loops. Hell on earth.

[pjmlp]

They are badly copied Ant build files.

Ant came first, then when Microsoft redid the VS project format, they created MSBuild.

As incredible as it may sound, Ant is still easier to deal with than MSBuild.

[giamma]

Ant did not include IF THEN ELSE, unless you added the contrib package.

If you understood the paradigm, you could write branches in Ant files simply using properties and guards on properties ("unless"). Using IF in Ant was basically admission of not having understood Ant.

This said, I used Ant for a very limited amount of time.

[mrsmrtss]

The legacy version of MSBuild was really bad, but the modern MSBuild project files for .NET are actually quite concise and clean by default?

[spooky_deep]

Horrible. Would’ve been much nicer if they’d reached for Scheme.

[debugnik]

You say that, but people in OCaml keep bemoaning the use of mostly declarative s-expressions in the Dune build system. Imagine the reaction if MSBuild used an actual Scheme.

[Xelbair]

what's even worse that schema uses extremely generic types with attributes denoting actual type.

Makes reading it even harder, and any possible constraints due to type safety go out of the window, so we get worst of both worlds.

[shevy-java]

Wesnoth the game also has that via WML. Looks very ugly and obfuscated.