When upgrading from VS .NET 2003 to VS .NET 2005 the project files get changed, which all of you who have upgraded probably have noticed. VS 2003 will not be able to open VS 2005 project files (at least not VB and C#). What is really cool about the new project files is that they are actually MSBuild project files.

The consequence of this is that you don't need Visual Studio to build your projects, since MSBuild is part of the .NET Framework (you will find MSBuild.exe in  [WINDOWS]\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727). This will make it a lot easier to create you own build-script and even run it on a server that doesn't have VS. Team System Foundation Server have support for automating you builds if do not want to roll your own or buy a third party utility.