Ms Build publishing vs Visual Studio IDE publishing

Question

I am currently working on ms build to publish my winform application based on the environment selected (Dev or Prod). I am using Ms Build Community Task and referencing this article to achieve this purpose.

I had a few theoretical doubts based on publishing application.

1) Is there any difference in publishing through the visual studio ide and msbuild?

2) What do most developers prefer to use and why?

3) What are the advantages of using MsBuild to publish an application as compared to publishing through the visual studio IDE?

4) What is faster?

I am using a .net 3.5 winform application developed in Csharp and my question is pertaining to clickonce windows applications only. Please help me clear these doubts

Answer 1

 > 3) What are the advantages of using MsBuild to publish 
 > an application as compared to publishing through the visual studio IDE?

You can run msbuild for Continuous_integration on a dedicated build-server. No need to install Visual studio there (and no licence costs). The free dotnet-sdk (including msbuild) is enough.

Answer 2

I believe the later versions of Visual Studio use MSBuild as the compilation back end. In any case it is a good idea to learn the automated building tools and their configurations so you can achieve a one step build process, for robust testing and stress-free releasing.

Answer 3

I actually do something like this in deploying asp.net web applications. Learning MSBuild is a good thing to do because it expands your toolbox. More automation means fewer mistakes.