How to move onto automated builds with Visual Studio?

Question

I work in at small .net shop where we currently build all our solutions using the visual studio IDE. We want to progress to a point where we're in complete control of our MSBuild scripts for build, test, deploy - making use of the MSBuild community tasks etc.

I guess my question is: what will be different in Visual Studio development experience?

If we're creating our own MSBuild .proj files, does that mean we no longer have .csproj files? How do projects look in VS now?

Am I missing something really obvious?

UPDATE Thanks all for taking the time to respond. I'm aware of some of the build tools out there: CruiseControl, TeamCity and so on, and also that vs projects (.csproj etc) are just MSBuild files. What I'm trying to get a handle on is those people who've decided to write their own scripts and their own .proj files. Are they using the VS .csproj files just as the 'container' to hold their code files within the IDE? How do they trigger their own developer builds? Do they just fire up MSBuild from the command line? Have a button on a toolbar that effectively does the same?

In summary - yes, you can indeed use other tools to drive your build by calling the .sln file or .csproj files, but there's another way - how does that work?

Answer 1

We use msbuild to do automated builds and you can just point msbuild at your solution file without any changes.

Also just to clarify, we also use an automated build server (Hudson with .Net plugins) that uses msbuild to automate the process.