R – Build Process – What to use

build-processmsbuildnant

I'm considering writing my own delivery code using PowerShell and/or C#, maybe shelling to NAnt or MSBuild.

  1. Why should I not go this way? Is this such a really hard
    endeavor compared to using NAnt or MSBuild?
  2. Any good, modern book that can help?
  3. Any better ideas?

Background (P.S. This is a religious issue for some. No insult intended):

One person shop, multiple exploratory projects. As most of us – Now windows and ASP.Net. Considering mobile and cloud.

I've started meddling with NAnt, and have tried to follow Expert .Net Delivery Using NAnt and CruiseControl.Net. The whole issue of "delivery" was put on ice and now it's time to "defrost" it. However, I'm not sure which way to go. From what I've learned:

NAnt is showing its age. It's clumsy: it's much harder to understand and maintain than a modern, OO language such as C#. Even after I've followed the book it seems strange to work in an arcane environment where what you want executed is XML, and looping and inheritance are (as far as I remember before the "ice age") are hard to impossible.

MSBuid is MS specific. I'm not even sure if it would support non MS environment. Team foundation server is expensive.

Even so, they somehow both seem to provide value because on my SO search I haven't heard anybody using their own custom software. However, I don't understand why not use C# and simply call NAnt and/or MSBuild tasks as needed.

SO – NAnt Vs. MSBuild

My advice is just the opposite – Avoid MSBuild like the plague. NANT is far far easier to set up your build to do automatic testing, deploy to multiple production environments, integrate with cruisecontrol for an entry environment, integrate with source control. We've gone through so much pain with TFS/MSBuild (Using TFSDeployer, custom powershell scripts, etc) to get it to do what we were able to do with NANT out of the box. Don't waste your time.

SO – NAnt vs. scripts:

there's much more to building a product than just compiling it. Tasks such as creating installs, updating version numbers, creating escrows, distributing the final packages, etc. can be much easier because of what these tools (and their extensions) provide. While you could do all this with regular scripts, using NAnt or MSBuild give you a solid framework for doing all this

Best Answer

NAnt as a project is dead, or on life support (last release was 0.86 beta 1, two years ago). It was basically cut short by the release of MSBuild. NAnt was nice, MSBuild is OK I guess, but I feel more and more drawn to write code in, well, a language instead of some XML-based procedural stuff. With XML-based build frameworks the debugging experience is awful and you end up cheating by embedding "scripts" in c# which defeats the purpose of declaration over programmation. Same sad story as XSLT, for that matter.

Some good XML-free build frameworks:

I still use MSBuild since it's the format of csproj files, but for specific stuff I shun building logic in XML (no custom MSBuild tasks).

Related Topic