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Choosing MSBuild/TeamBuild vs NAnt


We’re choosing a build tool for VS 2008 project.
I’m not expert in any, only had put together a couple of NAnt scripts. So I give no objective technical information in this post, just impressions.

  • First discussion of this choice, back in 2005, is almost strictly in favor of NAnt. Though, read it to know about MSBuild differences and advantages.
  • Recent blog post by Oren Eini and int comments are also generally for NAnt. Additionally, you can use <msbuild> task in NAnt.
  • The latter mentions Yahoo! ALT.NET group discussion. Newsgroup fan can read a lot there, I also had some. There are reasonable votes there for MSBuild because it’s just deployed with .NET, ant it’s nearly functionally equivalent to NAnt.
    Though, I can’t forget first discussion that mentioned lack of tasks like editing files or grabbing text output, or incrementing build number – (you know, devil is in details!) – it seems to me that NAnt wins.
    Here’s the most useful message there, as for me.

You see, I didn’t go too deep down simple Google search. That was enough for me, you’re welcome to research deeper and to correct me… especially until I started creating build procedure <grin>

And I trust mature and popular opensource products.

One Comment

  1. Baptiston wrote:

    favorited this one, man

    Posted on 24-Mar-08 at 14:12 | Permalink

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