R – Using the ASP Compiler in NAnt to build an ASP .Net MVC application

To my knowledge, there is no automatic way of converting Ant script to NAnt. However, since NAnt is based off of the Ant the conversion process would not be too far from the original, as long as the tasks are the "core" ones. Possibly an XSLT translation could be made on the Ant scripts to convert to NAnt as both are XML. If one were to go down this path the conversion should be done dynamically based of the original Ant scripts, so that only one set of scripts would have to be maintained.

If you would like to write and compile your C++ code inside of Visual Studio it's tough to beat the functionality that is built in with the IDE. However, this requires creating project files though. Otherwise, it seems that one would risk fighting an uphill battle with the tool.

One option for the tests would be to call out through a custom build step to run them.

I wonder if you have to change the framework that NAnt is running under.

Also, look into the NAntContrib project. That has the MSBuild task. We use this to build our 2008 projects, where we use the fancy sytax sugar like what you want, down to 2.0 assemblies. One thing we had to do though was replace the MSBuild.exe in the C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727 with one that forwards the request on to the 3.0 MSBuild.exe

Here is the code we use to replace MSBuild.exe in the 2.0 path. I can't remember where I got this code. I tried to find it online but can't.

Build this to MSBuild.exe and replace your 2.0 one with this one.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Text;

namespace MSBuild
{
    public class Program
    {
        public static int Main(string[] args)
        {
            for (int argIndex = 0; argIndex < args.Length; argIndex++)
            {
                if (args[argIndex].Contains(" "))
                {
                    string quotedArg = string.Format("\"{0}\"", args[argIndex]);
                    args[argIndex] = quotedArg;
                }
            }

            string arguments = string.Join(" ", args);

            // HACK: I should probably change
            //       this to automaticlaly 
            //       determine the path

            Process process = Process.Start("C:\\WINDOWS\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework\\v3.5\\MSBuild.exe",arguments);

            process.WaitForExit();

            return process.ExitCode;

        }
    }
}