@khalidabuhakmeh see, they need a flexible XML format to express a list of file paths. I happen to know of one! It's MSBuild! It's perfectly suited for dealing with sets of paths, and powerful enough to express both simple and advanced scenarios. Traversal projects (dirs.proj) are already well supported and used by huge codebases inside Microsoft. Tooling exists. Just take the traversal projects and don't invent a new format.
@khalidabuhakmeh It will be trivial for Rider to implement support for Traversal projects, but if they invent a custom format you guys are going to have to write support for it from scratch.
And then they'll discover that users want folders! Users want globs! Users want solution-level files! Users want conditions! Users want solution-level NuGet packages! Users want editorconfigs! Slowly their format will evolve into a bad, ad-hoc, poorly designed subset of MSBuild.
@khalidabuhakmeh@KirillOsenkov Visual Studio supports multiple project types that aren't based on MSBuild. The solution file format needs to support those, as well.
@tmeschter@khalidabuhakmeh@KirillOsenkov There are so many benefits in .NET to sticking with something like a traversal project that I'd rather VS invent different solution files for different languages. The only thing that really benefits from one solution file format is VS devs.
@KirillOsenkov@khalidabuhakmeh Traversal projects are useful in repos with lots and lots of projects where building a subset is a meaningful operation. But for most developers a simplified solution file format is more immediately useful.
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