With growing projects and project teams with 3 or more persons the need for a professional Software Change, Configuration, Source Control and Build Managagement ("SCM") is rising dramatically, especially if there are a lot of specialized internal and external libraries that change frequently.

At netzkern we evaluated NAnt, MSBuild, CruiseControl.NET and (of course) Visual Studio Team System over the last week.

Although VSTS is by far the most expensive solution (about 70.000,- € for 10 developers with Visual Studio Team Editions and 22.000 for 10 developers using Visual Studio Professional + CAL for Team Foundation Server), it seems not to be the best solution at all.

Working some days in projects with several of the tools mentioned above, we found that the best solution for our team (at the moment 6 developers with about 8 visual studio projects and several libraries in the running project) is a tool that is mostly unknown: FinalBuilder.

It is not only very flexible, intuitive, based on .NET and features great functionality with a lot of integrated actions and javascript/vbscript support, it also has the ability to work with a variety of version control systems (we use Subversion, but may switch to TFS because of its VS integration), integrates other build tools like MSBuild and NAnt and can be extended through the integrated IDE and complete .NET-based development.

Because of its integrated .NET and XML support it is also great for Sitecore-based projects, has support for databases, IIS management and can be used with a build server for Continous Integration.

To be honest I would expect such flexibility and functions in a so expensive tool like VSTS.