Code Library

NAnt is an open source .NET build tool used to compile .NET applications. The compilation is performed by running NAnt manually and passing the path to NAnt build scripts. The build script is an XML file that consists of different tasks that NAnt will perform, such as fetching latest source code from the source control, creating and/or deleting certain directories and/or files on the file system, building solutions, etc.

NAntContrib provides extra tasks and tools that are not present in NAnt.



Setting up NAnt along with NAntContrib
Follow these steps to set up NAnt along with NAntContrib

i Download latest version of NAnt from http://nant.sourceforge.net
At the time of writing this document the latest version is 0.85 - nightly build. Version 0.84 has a bug that does not allow compilation of Web Applications. Make sure to download Version 0.85.

ii Unzip NAnt to D:\citools\nant folder. Add the \nant\bin to systems Path environment variable.

iii Download latest version of NAntContrib from
http://nantcontrib.sourceforge.net

iv Unzip NAntContrib to D:\citools\nantcontrib folder.

v Copy all the files from \nantcontrib\bin into \nant\bin



How does NAnt work?
NAnt is driven by an XML file that contains instructions about which projects to build and the tasks to be executed. The task (a tag in the NAnt build script) is where NAnt runs code and calls executables. Tasks can have multiple attributes or arguments. NAnt expects these XML build file to be named filename.build.

For more information about NAnt refer to http://nant.sourceforge.net/wiki

The basic function of NAnt is to build or compile .NET source code. The path to the .NET Solution file (.sln) is specified in one of the tasks of the NAnt script along with the path to the output directory where NAnt stores the result of compilation.

Along with compiling the source code NAnt also performs many other tasks as well, for instance to fetch source code from VSS and perform compilation on that source code. This task is in the build scripts along with several other tasks.

Source of Information : Enterprise Solution Providers, Inc. 2005 – v1.0