[NAnt-users] NAnt Fix for .NET 3.5 Compiling Without Visual Studio

[Ben F. <dat...@gm...>]

I recently had the problem that I created a build server that did not have
Visual Studio installed and I needed to compile .NET 3.5 code. I figured out
that NAnt 0.86 beta 1 was looking for registry keys in the
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0a\WinSDKNetFxTools hive.
To fix this I installed the Windows Server 2008 and .NET 3.5 SDK, which
creates the registry keys at HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft
SDKs\Windows\v6.1\WinSDKNetFxTools.

To get NAnt to recognize the installed SDK I added the following registry
keys:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0a]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft
SDKs\Windows\v6.0a\WinSDKNetFxTools]
"InstallationFolder"="C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft SDKs\\Windows\\v6.1\\"
"ProductVersion"="6.1"

It basically points the v6.0 SDK to the v6.1 one that is installed. From
there, NAnt can find the tools necessary to compile .NET 3.5 code without
having Visual Studio installed. I'm not sure there is anything that the NAnt
dev team could do about this because they don't actively modify the
environment to detect installed SDKs.

If anyone has a suggestion on how to get this check into the trunk for NAnt
please let the dev team know! I've written a blog post about this as well at
http://dataplex.org/blog/2009/01/fixing-nant-086-beta-1-for-net-35-continuous-integration/

Thanks,
Ben Floyd