I hated it too. I don&#x27;t recall a single good moment about using MSBuild. I never once felt like I&#x27;d figured it out, nor that I was getting to grips with it. But perhaps its brilliance was just beyond my ken.<p>It was astoundingly verbose, rather poorly documented (I didn&#x27;t think much of the official book either), extremely short on any kind of examples that might be usable with slight tweaks when you&#x27;re getting started, and seemed to make unnecessarily heavy weather out of the simplest of tasks. Your debugging options are rather limited (especially if something goes wrong in one of your DLLs!), and I for one found the log files very hard to read.<p>(On more than four occasions, I also lost a lot of source files after doing a build|clean. I never managed to finger MSBuild for this directly, but there aren&#x27;t that many programs that are invoked on build|clean, and fewer yet that rely a filing system watcher to tell them which to delete, so I know where my suspicions lie.)<p>I also have vague memories of finding out that only certain constructs could be made conditional, and that there were no facilities for abstracting conditions, making some of my files very repetitive and long-winded - but to be honest, at this point, I&#x27;ve blanked most of it.