NAnt – really?
So I’m looking at taking JPB’s advice on a Visual Studio project setup and his reference to using NAnt for his normal builds – even small projects. I’ve seen reference to NAnt for years now and am still having trouble thinking this is just overkill for a “small” standard project.
I’m running a VS2005 project with 8 projects and my compile only takes 3 minutes. I know people have claimed orders of magnitude of build time improvement, but it still seems strange to go through the hassle of creating and maintaining XML when I decide I need to breakout the project into another assembly… if this were going the way of Continuous Integration, I could see the benefits there, but would the .build file have to be different on the CI server (e.g. SVN Update, clean, test targets).
What am I missing for the small development project?
Update: My apologies to JPB on the assumption he suggested all projects run NAnt. I’m still curious, is it overkill to use NAnt, Rake, etc for compiling a solution with less than 20 projects / 10,000 lines of code?
Author: Brett Veenstra | Category: Programmer | Comments(1) October 2007
I throw in my 2 cents here…I had a chance to use Ant in a Java project a couple years ago, and I’d say if nNant is anything like it (and I think it’s pretty similar), I’d say its worth using a script-based build tool for even the smallish projects, regardless of whether you’re going the CI route or not.
I found Ant very simply once I was familiar with the tool…once you have a working knowledge of the tool, you can whip up a new build project in no time. Then, you can do nightly builds minimally (and you’re ready for CI when the time comes). Plus, if you have a tool/script to bake the SVN version number into the assemblies being built (very helpful come debugging-time), you can easily add that to your build process. And once you’ve got a build process in place, you’ll definitely think of things to add to the build (testing, documentation, installer…)
I’d say it’s work it, just for the nightly builds