MSBuild is a build tool/platform for .NET from Microsoft. MSBuild is similar to NAnt in many ways—it uses the XML format for its build files and also has projects, properties, and targets.

But, MSBuild solves one of the biggest cons of using NAnt. With NAnt, the build system that is used in Visual Studio (the de facto IDE for .NET) is very different from that used by the command-line build process. The NAnt build file has no effect on what happens when we perform a build from Visual Studio. With the introduction of MSBuild, however, Visual Studio uses MSBuild to build the projects as well. Thus, .NET projects can now be built in the same manner from Visual Studio as from the command line. Also, since MSBuild is available as a tool independent from Visual Studio, the builds can happen (on CI) without the need for Visual Studio to be installed.

MSBuild build files or project files are the same as the project files that Visual Studio uses (*.*proj files).