[nant-dev] NAnt Designer Support

[Mitch D. <mit...@mo...>]

Hi folks,

I'm sure most of you are aware of NAntpad by Anthony Brown. Well, his
work has gotten me thinking about "designer" support in NAnt and whether
it would be feasible to try to do it in NAnt.

We could define a "designer factory" which would spit out the UI classes
depending on what platform NAnt was being used on (since WinForms isn't
everywhere). You could hook up the designer factory to each task.

=09
[NAntDesigner(typeof(NAnt.Core.Tasks.Design.XmlPokeTaskDesigner)]
	public class XmlPokeTask : NAnt.Core.Task {
		...
	}

To get some level of reuse in the designers, the designer attributes
could also be marked against individual properties. I see this being
useful for things like a regular expression builder, XPath expression
builder and elephant in the living room example - file/directory
browser.

Reason: One of the most common complaints I hear about NAnt is that its
too hard to use, even though it oozes power and flexibility. A lot of
people run with Visual Build from Kinook (another fine product), but I
think some kind of designer support would give NAnt the edge.

----------------------------------------
- Mitch Denny
- mit...@mo...
- http://www.monash.net
- +61 (414) 610141
-=20