[MonoDevelop] Moving to MSBuild

[Andres G. Aragoneses]

Lluis Sanchez wrote:
> El dt 26 de 02 del 2008 a les 01:06 +0100, en/na Federico Di Gregorio va
> escriure:
>> Il giorno mar, 26/02/2008 alle 01.00 +0100, Lluis Sanchez ha scritto:
>>> Hi!
>>>
>>> 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?
> 
> The main reason is to avoid maintaining yet another file format for .net
> projects. We'll have to support MSBuild anyways (for VS and SD
> compatibility), and the MSBuild file format is flexible enough for our
> needs, so there is no compelling reason for using a custom file format.


I have a question about this: Will the MD file format be maintained
anyway (or not dropped at least)? If the answer is 'no', then I just
wanted to point out a number of reasons not to do this:
- There are several projects that already use it.
- There are some interesting things in the MD project file format that I
think are better than MSBuild:
1) Same file extension for any type of project regardless the language.
2) Solutions inside solutions support. (Even in Mono SVN this feature is
used.)
3) Support for unmanaged projects (well, I'm not sure if the MSBuild
counterpart of this either exists, or if it's supported in MD, or if its
support is planned)?
4) Use of not-win32ish stuff (for example \backslashes\ for paths).

Thoughts? Any point of view will be appreciated.

	Andres

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