I was playing with Hudson a few weeks ago and I find it much friendlier to use than CCNET. It even has some (limited) support for .NET development, so it’s a viable alternative. I haven’t tested it in distributed CI environment though so I don’t know if it offers a better experience than CCNET.

Quite right, and by “easy set up”, I’d say “check out from VCS”. I think as much as possible, all your build tools could be stored in a special VCS repository, that way you can upgrade them in one place

I totally agree (it is one of the “DO’s” mentioned in http://igorbrejc.net/development/continuous-integration/continuous-integration-builds-dos-and-donts). The only problem I see with using VCS for auto-retrieving SW for CI purposes is that this requires setting up VCS access from these machines. We in our team tend to work on a lot of smaller projects, each of which has its own SVN repository. We have to set up CI for new projects frequently.

I’ll take a look at Ant SCP’s task.

-Explore Hudson as your build tool.It may be in Java, but you can use Ant to msbuild or studio; you just need to get the test results into a format it can present.

-Explore VMWare or equivalent for simulating various machine configs. IF you are targeting windows, you can have the different SKUs, even the different locales you need to test. Hudson works with virtual machines, though VMs can cause tests to fail in odd ways.

Quite right, and by “easy set up”, I’d say “check out from VCS”. I think as much as possible, all your build tools could be stored in a special VCS repository, that way you can upgrade them in one place, and make sure all build/test servers run the exact same version of your deployment tools.

Personally, when I don’t use rsync (which would require having Cygwin in the PATH, indeed annoying to setup on Windows, plus a script invocation), I go with Ant+Scp task [http://ant.apache.org/manual/OptionalTasks/scp.html]. Ant is already on most build servers, you just need to add the ant-contrib tasks and the JSCH jar file to your Ant lib/ directory to make it work. After that, it’s a simple matter of deploying using an Ant <fileset> to select what to deploy. The whole thing can easily live in your build-tools VCS!