Not that I'm really against this article, but psake (https://github.com/psake/psake) is a more realistic end-goal to handle the kind of flexibility you really need in projects. (It's accomplishable through MSBuild pre/post actions, but those are murder to edit anywhere but Visual Studio.) The problem with it, which is potentially a big one, is that psake uses PowerShell, and is therefore Windows-only. I'm hopeful that PowerShell can be ported to Unix soon as part of the general open-sourcing of Microsoft's .NET stack. I wouldn't use PowerShell as a replacement for bash, but as a cross-platform equivalent to Groovy/CRaSH, it'd be very handy for exactly this kind of thing. (Think of how Gradle fits into the Java world.)
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Not that I'm really against this article, but psake (https://github.com/psake/psake) is a more realistic end-goal to handle the kind of flexibility you really need in projects. (It's accomplishable through MSBuild pre/post actions, but those are murder to edit anywhere but Visual Studio.) The problem with it, which is potentially a big one, is that psake uses PowerShell, and is therefore Windows-only. I'm hopeful that PowerShell can be ported to Unix soon as part of the general open-sourcing of Microsoft's .NET stack. I wouldn't use PowerShell as a replacement for bash, but as a cross-platform equivalent to Groovy/CRaSH, it'd be very handy for exactly this kind of thing. (Think of how Gradle fits into the Java world.)
If you want to run on both Windows and UNIX-style systems, try FAKE (https://github.com/fsharp/FAKE). It's rapidly becoming a popular choice for building all sorts of .NET projects. Scott Hanselman recently covered it on his blog: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ExploringFAKEAnFBuildSystemFor...
Or use Rake with Albacore, a Windows/MSBuild plugin for Rake, and be done with it.