Advantages of using MSBuild or NAnt versus running DevEnv.exe from command-line

Question

Can anyone explain what advantages there are to using a tool like MSBuild (or NAnt) to build a collection of projects versus running DevEnv.exe from the command-line?

A colleague I had worked with in the past had explained that (at least with older versions of Visual Studio) using DevEnv.exe was much slower than the other techniques, but I haven't read any evidence of that or if that is now a moot point now that starting with 2005, Visual Studio uses MSBuild under the hood.

I know one advantage of using MSBuild allows you to build your projects without requiring Visual Studio to be installed on the build machines, but I wasn't sure if there were others.

Answer 1

One reason is because there's much more to building a product than just compiling it. Tasks such as creating installs, updating version numbers, creating escrows, distributing the final packages, etc. can be much easier because of what these tools (and their extensions) provide.

While you could do all this with regular scripts, using NAnt or MSBuild give you a solid framework for doing all this. There's a lot of community support for both, including additional tasks that can be downloaded (such as the MSBuild Community Tasks Project). Plus, there's support for them in numerous third party and open source products.

If you're just interested in compiling (and not the entire build process), you may find one time saving benefit of MSBuild is the support for building with multiple processors.

Answer 2

The obvious answer from my team is that not everbody has visual studio installed, in particular we do not install Visual Studio onto our build/CI servers.