MSBuild explained: Understanding Microsoft’s build platform

Visual Studio is a lot more than an editor and debugger; it’s the host for Microsoft’s cross-platform build tools. MSBuild is one of those forgotten heroes, a tool that’s at the heart of all your development processes, but one that’s hidden behind the façade of your development environments. MSBuild is where your code, libraries, and SDKs are marshaled and delivered to .NET and other compilers.