
Comparing NAnt and MSBuild for Web Development
Explore the differences between NAnt and MSBuild, both popular build automation tools for web development. NAnt is cross-platform with integration for unit testing and documentation generation, while MSBuild is integrated with .NET and Visual Studio, making it easy to get started. Learn about their subjective differences and considerations for setting up build machines with tools like CruiseControl.
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Presentation Transcript
NAnt Cross-platform (supports Linux/Mono). It may be handy for installing a web site to multiple targets (that is, Linux Apache and Windows IIS), for example. 95% similar in syntax to Ant (easy for current Ant users or Java builders to pick up) Integration with NUnit for running unit tests as part of the build, and with NDoc for producting documentation.
MSBuild Built-in to .NET. Integrated with Visual Studio Easy to get started with MSBuild in Visual Studio - it's all behind the scenes. If you want to get deeper, you can hand edit the files.
Subjective Differences NAnt documentation is a little more straightforward. For example, the MSBuild Task Referencelists "Csc Task - Describes the Csc task and its parameters. " (thanks for the "help"?), vs theNAnt Task Reference "csc - Compiles C# programs." UPDATE: I've noticed the MSBuild documentation has been improved and is much better now (probably on par with NAnt). Not easy to figure out how to edit the build script source (*.*proj file) directly from within Visual Studio. With NAnt I just have Visual Studio treat the .build script as an XML file.
Apparently, in Visual Studio, Web Application Projects don't get a *.*proj file by default, so I had great difficulty figuring out how to even get MSBuild to run on mine to create a deployment script. NAnt is not built-in to Visual Studio and has to be added, either with an Add-In, or as an "External Tool". This is a bit of a pain to set up. (Edit:) One of my coworkers brought this up--if you want to set up a build machine usingCruiseControl for continuous integration, CruiseControl integrates with NAnt nicely out of the box. UPDATE: CruiseControl also has an MSBuild task.