Products · Product
MSBuild
Raised as a usability problem by 21 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2012–2025), in 17 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
XML project files can't be edited by GUI or by handUnreviewed
20122026- Verbose XML and heavy syntax; users get lost fixing things beyond the IDE2024-01-05
- Project files become unreadable when adding logic due to XML2021-06-18
- XML project files are unusable as either GUI-editable or hand-written build descriptions2019-10-25
Builds take eight minutes and dependency resolution is unreliableUnreviewed
20122026- Build system is poorly documented and hard to use beyond C#2020-06-08
- Build takes eight minutes and dependency resolution is shoddy, making building .NET projects frustrating2015-09-03
- Hard to debug moderately complex project files; VS and command-line builds behave differently2015-03-19
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 22 complaints
- Documentation is verbose, full of jargon, and never clarifies concepts or functionality2025-11-11
- Crusty framework projects constantly break with MSBuild version errors2024-04-13
- Verbose XML and heavy syntax; users get lost fixing things beyond the IDE2024-01-05
- Confusing to learn because too much happens under the hood2022-03-13
- Project files become unreadable when adding logic due to XML2021-06-18
- Confusing @ and % syntax; author must trial-and-error to get expressions working2020-08-18
- Build system is poorly documented and hard to use beyond C#2020-06-08
- Hard to properly configure dependencies between modules, even for Microsoft employees2019-10-27
- XML project files are unusable as either GUI-editable or hand-written build descriptions2019-10-25
- MSBuild XML is huge, slow and blundering, hard to work with2019-01-26
- Building multi-targeted projects that reference multi-targeted packages is a nightmare due to hard-coded references2017-05-09
- Mixed declarative and imperative XML syntax for build tasks feels like it fights the user2015-09-03
- Build takes eight minutes and dependency resolution is shoddy, making building .NET projects frustrating2015-09-03
- Log files are very hard to read and debugging options are limited2015-09-03
- Hard to debug moderately complex project files; VS and command-line builds behave differently2015-03-19
- Visual Studio silently replaces wildcards in project references with expanded file lists when saving2015-03-19
- Documentation is so poor that users struggle to learn correct usage2015-03-18
- Powerful but obtuse at times, hard to understand2015-01-11
- Simple tasks take hours because of config file hell2014-08-14
- MSBuild and NAnt need lots of boilerplate to set up2013-11-03
- Build steps need Visual Studio or extra packages installed on the build server2013-08-20
- Deploying on .NET is an atrocious experience, painful to work through2012-02-14