I'm coming from the Java/maven dev world and frankly, I've been spoiled. It's stupid easy to wire in both dependency management, test frameworks, reporting frameworks, publishing, etc with maven. I primarily build from the command line but all of this is also integrated into the IDE too and it's trivial to extent. One click/command builds, tests and deploys everything. Build portability is very easy as long as java is installed.

How does everyone in the .NET world handle this? I know Nunit exists as well as mstest and nugget. Can they be wired into msbuild? I've found VS's integration with build & test an after thought and it seems to have always been that way.

Any strategies to making the build portable without requiring a bunch of additional microsoft msi's installed and/or visual studio? I've experimented with using maven to call msbuild, but the large number of environment variables have made it prohibitive (mostly paths for nunit, nugget, visual studio paths, etc).

Profiling with VS seems to be so so in comparison to tools like what netbeans and eclipses provide where I get real time metrics on time spent in each method and can dive down to quickly find bottle necks. Is this possible with VS?