I have run into this problem many times. I am not sure if its in the shared libs from msbuild or in visual studio. But when you for instance use wildcards and then write back a project file the wildcard gets replaced with a list of files (currently matching the wildcards) when you open and save with Visual Studio.

Not sure where this code may be, if someone can point me to it I would be happy to investigate, create some unit tests, and likely send a PR

Cheers,

Greg