[MonoDevelop] Moving to MSBuild

[Michael Hutchinson]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 7:06 PM, Federico Di Gregorio <fog at initd.org> wrote:
>  > Some people asked me to comment on the move to MSBuild that I mentioned
>  > in my blog.
>
>  You explained very well how, but can you comment on why?

Since the MSBuild format is extensible enough to support all of the
information we wish to store, it makes very little sense to implement
our own format. These change will:
* Make things much easier and less confusing for users who want to
interoperate with #Develop and Visual Studio, by being fully
compatible with their native project file format.
* Give MD and Mono a much better command-line build story. MSBuild is
extensible enough to be able to replace makefiles, so when the XBuild
work is completed, solutions will be buildable directly on Mono and
.NET without having MonoDevelop installed.
* Lead to less maintenance for us. With only one major project
backend, we can spend time on other features :-)

In the end, MSBuild integration will be very similar in principle to
Makefile integration. MD will load and store the variables and lists
that it understands, and invoke targets to build projects. By
hand-editing the project files you will be able to set up very complex
and powerful build systems if needed.

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com