One step forward, Two steps forward

It was a great day today.  Not just because i went to Mini-golf
with my team and scored a 49 on a par 57 course, but because we finally
completed our migration of the C# IDE source tree to the MSBuild system
We've wanted to do this for quite a long time but we never had the time
to do a full migration and we also kept on running into a few issues
that kept causing problems.  So we worked with the MSBuild team to
resolve all of them, and as of today we now build just fine with their
fantastic system.

Plusses:

  1. Clean build time reduced from 6 minutes 20 seconds to 2 minutes 40 seconds.  That's 40% of the original build time!
  2. The project file is incredibly clean.  We have a simple
    wildcard inclusion will pulls in all *.h's and *.cpp's in our
    directory.  This means we don't have to strugle with keeping a
    project file and our on disk files in sync.  When we add a new
    cpp/h file anywhere in the directory (or subdirectory) MSBuild will
    pull it in
  3. We only have one build system that we use now.  We used to
    use the VS build system for command line builds (what eventually
    produces the final VS sku), and the VC++ build system for building
    within the IDE.   We did this so we could code in the IDE and
    get things like IntelliSense and whatnot.  This meant that we
    always had to keep two systems up to date.  Nothing like trying to
    submit a checkin through our build system and realizing a few hours
    later that you didn't update the command line build system
    properly.  Now we just have one project.  The same project
    builds from the command line or inside the IDE *identically*
  4. Much faster incremental rebuilds.  Because MSBuild watches
    actual file accesses, it can do a much better job determing what to
    rebuild then our old build system.  Faster incremental builds
    means quicker time between making changes and being able to use
    them. 

Minuses:

  1. Nothing

Great job MSBuild team!  This is going to be a big boon for us!