Components, Builds and Configuration Management

command.com writes: I've recently been placed in charge of configuration management for a modest programming team in a Fortune 500. As a software engineer, I've used version control software before, but I've never had to do it for 100 projects. The repository contains multiple products managed by different development teams on independent release schedules, and some products used shared components (DLLs). The current repository is a mess — you basically have to check out everything in order to build some products because there's no telling what dependencies it's pulled in — and it needs to get reorganized to allow us to achieve CMMI compliance. Best practices on managing repositories of this size and complexity are hard to come by, so I'm looking for some some real world experience on how other people have tackled this problem. How did you organize project folders (e.g. src, bin, include directories per project)? How was the nightly build affected by shared components? How did you track and manage dependencies? If you had to make deployment packages (MSI), how did you manage the shared components?