MSBuild

Here's an interesting article on MSBuild and its incorporation with Visual C++ 2005.

https://www.developer.com/net/cplus/article.php/3495506

I especially appreciate these comments of the author's :

This is the section of an article that a C++ author hates to write. Visual C++ support for MSBuild is coming, but not as soon as we'd like. For the Visual C++ .NET 2005 release, the project file format will be similar to the XML-based structure used in Visual C++ .NET 2003. The reasons for the lack of inbuilt MSBuild support are varied, but the main issue for Visual C++ will continue to be the need for the Visual C++ team to spread their resources between managed and native compilation, and the need to ensure that technologies such as MSBuild that come from the managed side offer adequate support for all the native features that Visual C++ continues to offer. The amount of work completed by the Visual C++ team during the Whidbey development cycle has been Herculean, and the fact that MSBuild support is not fully there in the next version is certainly understandable.