Today we had an interesting problem that a developer made a change to a Controller that removed an attribute from controller but left it in the page - which should then cause the compile error to a page, they accidentally forgot to check in the page. When we did an svn update on our other environments we got the new controller but not the new page (because he didn't check it in). I would expect that the force.com IDE would have had a compile problem, but it didn't. We also used the ant migration tool and pushed the new code to another environment, again no problems.
When we tried to access the page, it failed with the normal visualforce page error, but no debug logs.
So as a result of some trial and error, I removed some lines from the visualforce page, and when I added them back in, force.com IDE gave me a compile error.
So my question, is there a way to configure either/both the ant tool or the IDE to detect these type of errors?
Even when I do a save to server of my pages folder, nothing comes up. Seems like there should be a "rebuild/recompile all" task on the IDE and a "check pages" flag on the ant task...