Working with Code, not Executable XML
A couple of commenters on my last post said that XML is easier to work with tool-wise. This is true in a very strict sense. Code is incredibly expressive, and you can easily turn it into an object graph by simply executing it. I did something very similar a year ago, Saving object graphs to file: CodeGen and Executable Graphs.
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Actually I thought Rake vs NAnt is a good example of the limitations of Xml. NAnt holds up well for simple, straightforward build scripts. Add in some flow control and branching and NAnt doesn't scale very well. I've talked to a few people who've switched from NAnt to Rake even for .Net development when the project build file started to get too big and complex. A real programming language will always be more expressive than xml.
The idea here is what happens when you want to use the build script as the project file for VS as well.
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