Continuous Integration with Automated Builds
One of the coolest things in the .NET 2.0 framework is the msbuild tool which is basically a ripoff of the famous "ant" build tool, later ported to .NET as "nant".
MSBuild like the others uses an XML file with build tasks such as "SVNUpdate", "FileUpload" , or even "AppPoolCreate."
Scott Guthrie has a new
blog entry about it.
Martin Fowler's company has an excellent tool that they developed in house called "
Cruise Control". It's basically a system that launches the build files and creates online reports of bugs/errors if they were encountered. This means that nightly or weekly builds can be scheduled so that developers have a particular timeline to work towards when they need to integrate code. (Developer Sandboxes don't need to be on this).
Rahul