[nant-dev] Why use NAnt?

[Gerry S. <ger...@ya...>]

> One of the questions I'm sure they'll ask is: "Why
> should we use nAnt when
> VS.NET comes with some built-in configuration/build
> management tools?"

Here are couple of reasons off the top of my head.  If
others can think of more I would like to add this to
the web site.

* Not everybody may have a copy of Visual Studio on
every machine they would like to build the project,
ie, testers.

* NAnt and the .NET SDK are free

* One step build from checkout, compile, unit test,
documentation generation, packaging, and publish.

The benefit of this cannot be understated.  If I were
to come to your department as a new employee and a
fresh copy of XP and VS.NET, what are the steps I
would need to do to perform a complete build of your
project.

They should be:
1. Download and install NAnt.
2. Run it with build file located on the project web
site.

The build file should know how to get the source code
(as a guest), grab other libraries from the web
(internal or external), install them, rebuild
everything including the documentation, and tests.

* One step builds enable automated nightly builds.

* Continuous intergration where a server detects
changes to the source code repository, performs full
build from scratch, emails users on failure.

* Ability to easily add custom tasks to the build
process.  This flexibility makes it possible to send
email and log build reports.  See the mozilla build
process for an example.

* Cross platform support.  In the future Mono will be
a reality and VS.NET isn't going to be running under
Linux anytime soon.  Mono is already using NAnt as
their build tool.

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