Today I finally uncovered the "magic" of visual studio's power - all their crazy compiler tools and the like.
It's nothing but hundreds of thousands of lines of MSBuild XML that are packaged up and shipped with the application. Most all microsoft installers these days are just glorified MSBuild scripts.
It's all MSBuild and a compiler. That's it. Nothing else. Fan-f'king-tastic. Wish I had billions of dollars and all the time in the world to just blow on random shit...