A few years ago, I wrote a couple of Perl programs to automate our VB build process. I ended up using makefiles that simply used the commandline ss.exe to check-in, check-out files. I wrote a Perl program that would create the makefiles based on the contents of the VBP.
Another Perl program actually iterated through all the directories (based on a starting director) and looked for makefiles. When it found one, it would execute nmake.
The whole thing was very cool, cause it did logging, etc. Since this is my first post here, I'm not sure what I would need to do to post the code.