For new .NET SDK style projects you hardly ever need to customize the defaults and I know it's used for more stuff than .NET, but I just wanted to give an example where it actually doesn't suck. Also, you may not need to do everything in MSBuild, for some more complex stuff, you can use something like Cake (https://cakebuild.net/) in .NET for example and skip the programming in XML. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago

I've met teams that strongly prefer Cake [1] and it seems well maintained. Personally, I think there's too much baby in the MSBuild bathwater unfortunately and too much of the ecosystem is MSBuild to abandon it entirely. That said, I think MSBuild has improved a lot over the last few years. The Sdk-Style .csproj especially has been a great improvement that sanded a lot of rough edges. [1] https://cakebuild.net/. - Source: Hacker News / 12 months ago

This is why 90-99% of our builds are done with Cake. It isolates all of it and you can run the build locally if you want. Source: over 3 years ago

A good starting point of you want to get started with Cake is our website at Https://cakebuild.net/. Source: almost 4 years ago

I don't think it will get too much confusion, but there is a build system called Cake: https://cakebuild.net/. Source: almost 4 years ago

If you like that workflow you might love CheepCode[0] which I built specifically to support it! CheepCode connects to Linear and works on tickets as they roll in, submitting PRs to GitHub. [0] https://cheepcode.com. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago