When to use a build tool?

Question

A beginner question, bear with me: I\'m just wondering under what circumstances one should use a build tool like nant or msbuild? I\'m working on a medium sized application (.ne

Answer 1

Are you developing with Visual Studio? In that case, you are already using msbuild, since that is the underlying build engine of Visual Studio. Actually, a Visual Studio project file is nothing more than a msbuild script.

Apart from that, you can use the build engine on a dedicated build system, so that your binaries can be built unattended and without having Visual Studio installed. You can also use that for unit-testing.