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

Agreeing with and expanding on zacherates' answer ... Yes, you should always have some repeatable build process. While technically Visual Studio projects are MSBuild files, it's better to have the "official" build process be separate of the development environment.

In my mind, this is true no matter how big (or small) the team is. I use NAnt and CruiseControl.NET at home, where all I tend to work on are scratch projects and experiments. At work, we use a similar setup, but a bit more structured in how the NAnt scripts are put together.

It's definitely worth your time to look into it. It's not a cure-all, but it is a best practice for knowing exactly which build was released when, and what's in the wild. Being able to identify your compiled code is half the troubleshooting battle! :)