Having your build scripts in XML is one of the worst things you can do for maintainability and readability.

Treat your build scripts like you treat your source code (or, how developers should treat their source code) – with respect for readability and maintainability, not just for performance.

To that end, XML is a bad candidate to have. If you have any more than 15 or 20 lines of xml in a build document:

• It is hard to tell where things start, and what they depend on
• It is hard to debug the build
• It is hard to add or change things in the build logic
• XML case sensitivity sucks
• Creating, Adding and using  custom actions is a chore

To avoid XML, you can start using some of the many build tools out there that are either visual, or support a domain specific language for builds that is more readable, maintainable or debuggable than XML:

• Rake – Ruby Based DSL (Domain Specific Language) for builds, that is very robust and quite readable
• FinalBuilder and VisualBuild are two visual build scripting tools that give great readability into your build script