Continuous Integration: PowerShell vs. CI Server (CC.NET or Hudson)

CI Servers give you several advantages:

• Web access, usually with ability to integrate with existing authentication mechanisms (see Hudson's ActiveDirectory/LDAP support)
• Tons of existing support for unit testing, zip archive creationg, etc.
• Hudson (and others) supports slave build nodes, for doing distributed CI tasks.
• No need to maintain it yourself.

Some of these may not be things you need now but are you sure they aren't things you might need in the future?

I've installed Hudson a couple of weeks ago to replace the current CruiseControl server. The greatest advantage I see in Hudson is that pretty much anybody can use it, while launching a parametrized build with CruiseControl (or a batch file) is still scary for a lot of people.

Usually I tend to write all my build scripts with Ant (because it's portable), insert a couple of parameters and I invoke them from Hudson.

Hudson gives your scripts a great visibility (everything can be seen on the front page) and they are self explanatory. Usually with a bash script, you need to write a readme (that nobody reads) and remember where they are located.

... or have it both. Ayende (the creator of Rhino Mocks) has done that recently. He wrote a CI server using PowerShell. Perhaps this provides new insights for your discussion.