Daily Builds

I have started learning a while ago about automatic build tools. The purpose of such tools is to automate the build process of your application to determinate time interval - let say once a day. The benefits of such a process are:
1) Every morning you have most up to date application running in your test server.
2) In some future scenarios every morning you can get a list of all the tests that not run well by your unit tests.
3) Because the build process is occurring every day, its make a high quality level of the code made by the programmers' in order to keep the application work every night.

Apparently there is no shortage on the market of such tools. I chose the most common ones that used in the market.

1) MSBuild
2) NAnt
3) Cruise Control .net

After some testing I figure it out that all those tools are giving pretty much the same capabilities, all those tools define a new XML base language that uses targets to combine logical blocks and tasks to do atomic actions like copy directory, get latest from a safe source or open a new virtual directory in IIS.
Some tools, like Cruise Control .net give some extra capabilities like running automated build based on triggers like file change of check in to the safe source, but the base concept is the same.

I chose to concentrate on MSBuild, and it's not because I am a Microsoft freak it's because there is no benefits to the others tool on this one and I prefer to be sure to have support further on.

I did a presentation to my teammates about MSBuild and its concepts. So check it out.
MSBuild Presentation

By the way I forget to mention that all those tools are completely extendable by writing custom tasks and for each tool there is a large community that supports it and helps to solve issues.

Msbuild
NAnt
Cruise Control.net
more links are supplied within the presentation.

Have a nice work.