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?

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Answer 1

We have a large system consisting of C#, managed C++, and plain old unmanaged C++ assemblies/dlls. There is C++ code that depends on managed C++ code that depends of C# code that depends of managed C++ code that depends on plain old C++ code (whew!). When we were setting up our automated build environment a few years ago we discovered that MSBuild.exe didn't properly handle all of the dependencies that we have.

Working with Microsoft we were able to solve some of the issues but not all of them. If my memory serves me, we never could get the C# assemblies that depended on managed C++ dlls to build. So we ended up making a custom build script that called devenv.exe from the command line and it worked just fine.

Of course, that was with VS2005, it might be fixed now, but the script is still working so we haven't revisited the issue.