One of the comments that we frequently hear from users is "I couldn't do xyz with MSBuild, but I can now with FinalBuilder."
This is great, but hardly surprising. FinalBuilder includes out-of-the-box support for many more tools and processes than MSBuild. Not to mention that it has a GUI to set up your build process - no more editing XML files!
Lately, though, an increasing number of our users are moving to Microsoft Team System. One of the cornerstones of the Team System process is the Team Foundation Build engine, which is built on top of MSBuild.
Now, the Team Foundation Build wizard is fine if you only need to create simple build processes. Get some files, build some solutions, deploy some binaries to a file share. If you need to do anything more, though (and who doesn't?), then you're stuck back in XML land... The same applies if you want to edit your build processes after you've created them.
Plain XML editing, with no built-in support for third-party tools, no support for data processing, no support for parallelisation, FTP transfers, Active Scripting, structured exceptions, recursion or Windows system functionality...
FinalBuilder to the rescue!
The Team Foundation Build engine allows you to add custom MSBuild tasks at any stage of your build process. This means that, with just a couple of lines of XML, you can move your entire Team Build process to FinalBuilder! FinalBuilder can be used in place of MSBuild to provide functionality at every stage of the Team Foundation build process (fetch, compile, test & deploy.) What's more, it all fits perfectly within the Team System framework!
... Happy building!