Project configurations for multiple environments

Until now, we've been publishing websites and cloud services straight from Visual Studio and using Entity Framework Code First Migrations to build our databases. Deploying systems to non-development environments from builds on a developer machine is not a good practice as we don't have a controlled way of producing a reproducible, versioned deployment. If we deploy a local build, there is no guarantee that there are no differences between the source control and the local copy of code; even if we build from a fresh branch, so that we think the code is clean and it builds on our development environment, there is no guarantee that it will run on a server as we may have developer SDKs installed, assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) registry modifications, and so on.

Using a build server is a good way of making sure we have a clean build directly from a source control that is not influenced by the development environment and...