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MSbuild makes me want to blow my brains out.

I know it's no longer used in .NET Core and all the lucky people that don't have to deal with .NET Framework can happily move on.

But here I am, a complete idiot. Expecting MSBuild to build the exact same way from the CLI as it does if I run a build in Visual Studio. Expecting the build server to consistently produce the same result as if I built my solution locally.

Demanding meaningful earnings and error messages that don't leave me completely perplexed as to what's actually going on in the compiler.

Fuck me and fuck .NET Framework. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Comments
  • 4
    Ah man think of it that way: it could be worse.

    You could be in my situation, dealing with cmake and C++
  • 2
    Also doesn't msbuild lurk in .net core's/.net 5's background in some way or another? I mean the csproj files still share their format

    @ SortOfTested will probably know that
  • 0
    @LotsOfCaffeine There's a "new" sdk format that differs a lot from the previous one and you can even target Framework and Core simultaneously. The new format is amazing and perfect and I love it. But I'm still stuck on the old one for my web application that I am unable to update due to it being built on top of a third party CMS we can't get rid of.

    So tired of shit not just working consistently in an idempotent manner...
  • 1
    Working in classic asp.net sometimes make me sad
  • 1
    I think the problem is that ms build is older than visual studio so VS does dome extra steps on build that you have to explicitly run if using ms build, like resolving nuget packages.
  • 1
    God I hate msbuild. But I hate the other build tools ms has more. They really want you to move to their azure ecosystem and not build stuff through stuff like jenkins. It's surprising how little documentation I've been able to find on msbuild. Out of all the tools that build .net though, it probably works the best, at least as far as I've experienced.
  • 1
    @LotsOfCaffeine CMake is leagues more capable than MSBuild...
  • 0
    @Voxera yeah, I've tried navigating around it by using Cake. It gets me some of the way, but I'm running into issues where MSBuild.exe is being looked for in different places - some that don't exist on my machine.

    If run through the dotnet CLI, MSBuild is packaged separately. Then, visual studio has its own version depending on which version of visual studio you're using (hate the IDE as well) when you build.

    Ideally, I'd just have all my build tooling in the repo, but I have to fight the tech stack every goddamn step of the way. I'm getting too old for this crap...
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