In the past two years I worked on a project called bari which now reached an usable state. bari is a build management system, trying to fix Visual Studio's bad parts while keeping the good ones.

Basically it tries to make .NET development more convenient, when

• The application may consist of a large number of projects
• There may be several different subsets of these projects defining valuable target products
• Custom build steps may be required
• It is important to be able to reproduce the build environment as easily as possible
• The developers want to use the full power of their IDE

The main idea is to generate Visual Studio solutions and projects on the fly as needed, from a concise declarative build description. I tried to optimize this build description for human readability. Let's see an example, a short section from bari's own build definition:

- name: bari
  type: executable
  references:
    - gac://System
    - nuget://log4net
    - nuget://Ninject/3.0.1.10
    - nuget://QuickGraph
    - module://Bari.Core
  csharp:
    root-namespace: Bari.Console

The main advantage of generating solutions and projects on the fly is that each developer can work on the subset he needs for his current task keeping the IDE fast, but can also open everything in one solution if it is useful for performing a refactoring.

To keep build definitions short and readable, bari prefers convention over configuration. For example the directory stucture in which the source code lays defines not only the name of the modules to build, but also the way it is built. For example, in a simple hello world example the C# source code would be put in the src/TestModule/HelloWorld/cs directory, and bari would build target/TestModule/HelloWorld.exe.

bari unifies the handling of project references in a way that referencing projects within a suite, from the GAC, using Nuget or from a custom repository works exactly the same. It is also possible to write custom builders in Python.

For more information check out the getting started page.