MSBuild vs devenv for command line builds

I have experienced a project within a multilayer team: developers, testers, deployers. MSBuild was the main tool of the deployers: they could compile and recompile, just setting building parameters editing the xml config file of MSBuild without opening the devenv. In fact, they often used MSBuild in pre-prod environment where there was not devenv at all.

Nant is a similar tool by Apache Foundation.

For further info have a look here:

• MSBuild
• Nant

According to this MSDN Blog Entry they try to minimize the differences, but those that exist (i.e. using an integrated C# compiler instead of csc.exe or setting the BuildingInsideVisualStudio property) are mainly done to optimize the performance of builds.

The main advantage of MSBuild is that you don't need to have Visual Studio installed.

One limitation of MSBuild is that it does not support building Visual Studio setup projects (.vdproj).

(You can work around this by defining an exec task which calls devenv, but then you still need Visual Studio.)