If you ever manually work with Visual Studio 2003 projects (*.vcproj files), be aware that projects have both names and GUIDs, which are usually assigned by the IDE. If you try to duplicate a project in a solution by copying it to a new directory, renaming it, and adding the copy to your solution, the MSVC IDE will get confused since you didn't give your new project a new GUID. Other things might be effected by this confusion too, but the inter-project dependancy editor definately can't distinguish between the two same-GUID projects. This ends up making it impossible to correctly sequence the two project builds, and there's no clue in the UI about the cause of the problem, since the dependancy editor lists the two same-GUID projects under seperate names.

I don't know if MSBuild, in VS2005, is any better, but they claim to have made it more friendly to non-IDE use cases. The strange thing about this is that I'm not sure what purpose the GUID's serve: I'd think that having multiple projects of the same name would create a host of other problems that the GUIDs wouldn't solve by themselves. Combine that with the outright user hotility of string like this one, it's easy to wonder why the GUIDs are used.

{4051A65D-4718-41AE-8C94-6B1906EB4D77} = \
  {4051A65D-4718-41AE-8C94-6B1906EB4D77}


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