NAnt Alternatives [closed]

Question

I've been using NAnt for a while but it seems to be overly complex for what I need. I was wondering if there are any alternatives around for building C# projects?

Interfluent

Answer 1

I would say once you get started in NAnt it is not THAT complex. I was missing a little bit a good "let's get me started" tutorial and everything I read felt pretty dated. A good thing is that you can use MSBuild for building the application (that is what I am using) and doing the rest with NAnt.

At least I think it is not harder than MSBuild - and for things MSBuild is easier you are free to use MSBuild for that.

This is what I am using:

<exec program="msbuild.exe" 
      basedir="C:\windows\microsoft.net\Framework\v3.5\" 
      commandline="Project.csproj /p:OutDir=..\Outdir\; configuration=Release" />

Mano

Answer 2

There are some great alternatives now to NAnt and MSBuild.

nRake (or just Rake)

http://jamescrisp.org/2010/03/20/nrake-rake-builds-for-net/

psake -- build automation tool written in PowerShell

http://jameskovacs.com/2008/06/27/introducing-psake/

I've personally used NAnt and MSBuild and am anxiously awaiting our upcoming switch to one of these (we haven't decided yet which). NAnt and MSBuild are not that hard to start off with, but once build scripts start getting bigger and more complicated and you need to actually debug them, they become a huge burden to deal with. It really depends on how much you're automating.

Steward

I know this is an old post, but did you ever choose a new build process? – Toots

@MrAH, Now I would highly recommend either Grunt or Gulp. I personally prefer Grunt but Gulp has been getting a lot more conversions/attention recently. – Steward

Answer 3

You might try FinalBuilder - it's very easy to use, although I prefer to stick with NAnt. And you always have MSBuild...

Brittle

I like such tools, like Visual Build also but they are commercial and they require installing a whole lot of files on your system. Don't even thing about running them on another OS. – Hierolatry

Answer 4

There's MSBuild, but it's no simpler than Nant.

Both are fine once you get used to the syntax.

A simpler option is to use Batch files.

Another is to use CIFactory, which provides a quick way to get a build and continuous integration server up and running.

Stanwin

Answer 5

We are looking into Cake - the biggest advantage is that it's basically C#.
With the complex process we have today it's quite difficult to maintain our NAnt scripts used to build, package and label code as well as runnig unit tests, code coverage, static analysis etc..
See also Why should you use a general purpose scripting language for your build scripts?
Since most of our code is C# we rather use C#...

Mustachio

Answer 6

Phantom is a very neat alternative for C#. I wish it was in python (more portable) and more used because the syntax is very neat and powerful.

Hierolatry

Answer 7

Maven is a great build tool, it was developed mainly for the Java community but there is now a .NET plugin for building C# projects. There are fairly big conceptual differences between Maven (see wikipedia for a brief overview) and NAnt so you may want to read up on that first if you want to try it.

2 interesting features:

• Mature collection of plugins for doing common tasks such as testing, doc generation, deploying etc.
• Can automatically get project dependencies for you from a central repository

Autocrat