If you're not familiar with Cruise Control .NET, it's a continuous integration server for .NET projects. What's a continuous integration server? Well, think of it as a free developer. It's job description is not enviable:
- Wait for new code to be checked in by the other developers and make sure it can be compiled.
- Check the code for best practices.
- Run unit tests to make sure nothing is broken.
- Perform any last minute tasks
- Notify team members of the latest changes.
- Alert the appropriate people if something fails.
If you think about it, this is really a fitting analogy. FXCop ensures your code conforms to a large chunk of MS Patterns & Practices. With NUnit, you write tests to check some part of your code. This is the same as asking another developer to double-check everything for you. Finally, MSBuild and CC.NET tasks pick up a ton of other tedious tasks such as deploying a setup package, notifying people of changes, updating the company website, etc.
What this means is that the real developers can focus on the fun stuff: writing code, while "the new guy" does the grunt work.