There was nothing wrong with csproj, apart from the MSBuild verbosity baggage. JSON's a terrible format for anything like this due to lack of comments and visual noise. (The mandatory quotes all over the place makes it hard to read.)

But I can't imagine it is hard to convert between them. Most .csproj's are basically a list of references and a <Compile><Include>*.cs.

For a non professional developer, it is almost entertaining to watch all the fads coming and going.

XML is fantastic, all data XML!

XML is horrendous. All data in JSON. I can't believed we were using this awful XML!

JSON is sooo lame. XML is the new JSON!

Same for languages, frameworks, programming patterns, etc...

Even more volatile than fashions.

While some people get a bit cargo cult about things there is a rough consensus that XML is good for some things and terrible for others whilst JSON is the exact reverse ;-)

I personally rather like YAML for anything intended for humans to read and edit.

If XML didn't have those idiotic verbose closing tags, this probably wouldn't even be a discussion. Or if JSON had comments and didn't require quoting all keys.

What's funnier is seeing the HTTP/JSON folks re-invent SOAP. But maybe this time it'll actually be Simple.

> due to lack of comments

Visual Studio Code handles this by just allowing comments in JSON used for configuration, heh.

In other words it handles this by not actually using JSON. Sorta proves the point.