Cruise Control and Nant/Csc are a great way to automate the build of a web application that is file system based. You compile the application to a dll and then run unit tests against it. You can integrate this with your source control and use continuous integration as part of your development security blanket. I find this invaluable as I am often enhancing production systems.

All was going well until I added web references to the web application. The file that you would expect to find Reference.cs in the Web References folder is not present. It appears that this file is not generated when adding web references to the file system based web applications.

This page Using Web Deployment Projects with Visual Studio 2005 offers a little bit of explanation.

The web application builds correctly in Visual Studio. It also builds with MSBuild. So luckily I was able to edit the cruise.build file to swap from using Csc to MSBuild.