At a previous workplace we used svn externals to update dependent projects when a shared component was updated. This made it easy to see anything that those changes broke, as well as update dependent projects to the latest version of a shared component automatically without any intervention.

At a new workplace we are using cc.net with surround scm and I'm trying to find something similar in surround. I haven't found anything like externals, only "shared files", but unlike externals, the shared files doesn't allow you to point at a specific revision of a file for the external.

I'm interested in what other people are doing in these scenarios to lean on their continuous integration and treat it more for integration than a "continuous build" server. Does anyone know of a tool or something to do "externals" behavior without using svn?

I suppose having an xml registry file of which projects depend on which assemblies and if they should be using the latest version but this seems like overkill.