You haven't needed Visual Studio to build .net projects for a long time, project files are MSBuild files.

But there was no good way to edit .csproj files without an IDE and you needed to edit them for every source file you added (or moved).

Now you don't have to edit them as often (wildcards for files), they're easier to edit by hand (because they contain almost no clutter) and there are also command line tools to edit them (like dotnet add package).

Wildcards have been supported for source files for many years.

    <Compile Include="**/*.cs" />

I was doing this back in the .NET 3.5 days.

But nitpicking aside your point is well taken, the developer experience is far better with dotnet core.

As I understand it, if you ever opened such project in VS, it would replace the wildcard with the current list of files. So the usability of that approach was very limited.

Ah, I see. I wasn't using VS (which is why I found the wildcard trick). It seems like VS was the issue then, and one of the reasons donet core has a better experience is because it's much less bound to VS.

Correct. It wasn't really usable.

Speaking of the project files, the new csproj format is my favorite thing. We used to always get conflicts in them, and now we basically never do.

You've never needed Visual Studio to build .Net projects. They have supported MSBuild from v1.0, you just needed to write the project files by hand - a very tedious process.

It's just that building from Visual Studio is by far the most convenient method.

MSBuild was introduced around .NET 2.0 after Ant's introduction in the Java world.

Before there was a project format, callable with devenv command line tool.