Even on windows I find Msbuild,dotnet,csc,etc... so ugly and frustrating to use. MS is one freaking company and its tools have little consistency in their interfaces. How do you run the tool? Just msbuild.exe , oh no, that is too easy. You have to search program files and then program files (x86) and use the absolute path. How do you use the tool? No consistent help flags and even when there is you still have to look up online docs half the time (and each subcommand has its own page?). I lost track of how many times I just needed to build a small project and was forced to install like 10GB+ visual studio crap.<p>Please don't use visual studio to build your solutions if you are writing a cli app.<p>Their complex xml formats for solutions and projects are markedly inferior to makefiles imho! Mingw is the way for windows cli.