title: Best way to configure build directory structure for a windows application
body: <p>I am writing a small application at the moment and am trying to organise my build output to be a little closer to the finished product. The application is made up of a number of different projects. There is a core library that contains most of the functionality, a GUI app and a command line app that both reference the Core Dll, and a number of Plugin Dlls that are loaded at runtime and implement different data sources, these all reference core.dll, these also may include some other third party dlls. There are also a number of peripheral files such as a readme. And finally the core.dll and the datasource plugins are unit tested.</p>
  
  <p>I would like to configure my build so that everything is output into directories as I would expect it to be when installed. I want debug and release builds to be built into different directories but otherwise have the same directory structure. I only want tests to be built for debug builds, and want them to be runnable, but seperated (I guess all test dlls would get output into a seperate directory). Here is how I imagine the structure will be.</p>
  
  <pre><code>Code/
      solutions etc here
  Debug/
  
      Project.Core.dll
      Project.Gui.exe
      Project.Cli.exe
      readme.txt
      lib/
          ThirdParty1.dll
          ThirdParty2.dll
      DataSource/
          DataSource1.dll
          DataSource2.dll
      Tests/
          Project.Core.Tests.dll
          DataSource1.Tests.dll
  Release/
      same as Debug but without tests.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there any way of getting a solution to build like this? I'm beginning to think it will be difficult to build the plugins and the app all from one solution, and probably not even wise, but as they will all be distributed together it would be nice. I am open to using Nant or another build tool if that will make it simpler.</p>