> If you’re working in the .net ecosystem, you need to grok msbuild.

Agreed, it makes a huge difference.

Sadly Visual Studio made that difficult from the start of .net, given its history with attempting to hide the .csproj files from developers and thus reduce their exposure to it. Its a real shame they decided to build visual studio like that and didn't change it for years.

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appease7727 2 days ago | parent [-]

Huh? You could always access the csproj by right clicking on the project.

	▲	jve 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not quite. It required you to unload project, then you could right click and edit. And then reload project. And the load could take some time. Now with sdk style project you just click on the project and the .*proj file comes up and is editable.
	▲	Quarrelsome 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		as the other person stated, earlier versions of Visual Studio wouldn't let you directly edit the .csproj in the IDE. You were forced to "unload" it first. If you ran an extension to override this behaviour you'd end up with glitches. Its one of the main reasons I moved to Rider given I much prefer to edit the .csproj manually in many cases as opposed to going through the GUI. There's other little niggles, the Visual Studio gui for example offers a "pre-build" and "post-build" window that's kinda hacky. If you have more than one line in either of the windows the build no longer is able to push the _actual_ error back into the build. So its better to do this with separate target elements (that don't show up in this gui) or just run a pure msbuild file (.proj) to perform these tasks. Older visual studio was just a bad habit generator/crutch which babied a lot of developers who could have learned better practices (i.e. more familiarity with msbuild) if they had been forced to.