MSBuild Evaluation Phases For a comprehensive overview of MSBuild's evaluation and execution model, see Build process overview. 1. Initial properties : environment variables, global properties, reserved properties 2. Imports and property evaluation : process , evaluate top-to-bottom 3. Item definition evaluation : metadata defaults 4. Item evaluation : with , , , glob expansion 5. UsingTask evaluation : register custom tasks Key insight: evaluation happens BEFORE any targets run. Slow evaluation = slow build start even when nothing needs compiling. Diagnosing Evaluation Performance Primary: b…