Essential .NET – Essential MSBuild: A Build Engine Overview for .NET Tooling (MSDN Magazine)

Those of you who have been following .NET Core over the past few years (has it been that long?) know all too well that the “build system” has experienced a significant amount of flux, whether it be dropping built-in support for gulp or the demise of Project.json. For me as a columnist, these changes have been challenging as I didn’t want you, my dear readers, to spend too much time learning about features and details that ultimately were only going to be around for a few months. This is why, for example, all my .NET Core-related articles were built on Visual Studio .NET 4.6-based *.CSPROJ files that referenced NuGet packages from .NET Core rather than actually compiled .NET Core projects.