As a C++ stickler, this has really been bugging me. I've always liked the idea of the "language-independant framework" that Microsoft came up with roughly a decade ago. Why have they dropped the ball on this idea? Does anyone know the reasoning behind it?
Part of the reason will be that C++ support is actually two languages in one -- the native and the CLI variants; that extra development load has been acknowledged by the Visual C++ team as the reason that proper MSBuild integration lagged (lags? I haven't checked in 2008 or later) behind other languages.
Another part will be to do with the code generation during compilation that goes on in a C# build to support e.g. the binding "magic"; I've found that even in F#, you don't get it "just happening".