I still havn't hit the problem with the level of agression I would like to be able to devote to the effort. Surface evaluations appear to bear out my initial concerns that nothing is truely capable of everything I need without significant development effort. NMaven: 1) Best long term choice available. From past experience a couple years ago building C# with pre-NMaven .NET sandbox plugins as well as past discussions on this mailing list the ability for the repository to store assemblies without requiring versions in the file names (and assembly meta-data) is absolutely critical.
--- On Tue, 9/2/08, Brett Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: From: Brett Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Questions regarding current state of C# build systems To: [email protected] Date: Tuesday, September 2, 2008, 2:36 AM Hi James, Sorry it has taken quite a while to reply, I've been behind on mail. You may have already made a decision, but it'd be great to hear what you found out. Thoughts inline... On 10/08/2008, at 9:36 AM, James Carpenter wrote: > ============================ > Questions: > > I could use some advice on the current state of C# build tooling. > > * What choices are available and how would you contrast them? I am > currently aware of NAnt, MSBuild and NMaven but have little > experience with any of them, although I am user level expert with > Ant and Maven. Are there any commercial solutions which are > currently way ahead of the above choices? I'm not aware of any other commercial solutions to this specific area myself. MSBuild is completely integrated with visual studio which is of benefit, though the available tasks I have found for it for the tools you refer to are limited. NAnt certainly has been around longer than NMaven and so is more mature and has more resources available for it. However, I believe NMaven is the closest to what you are ultimately looking for: being based on Maven you will already have the ability to run the tools you've described and use it from within any continuous integration server, and this is certainly where its objectives lay. > * Although i am convinced a maven based .NET build will potentially > one day satisfy all my requirements, I don't have a great grasp of > the status quo. Is NMaven in its current state a better solution > for a very large project than other choices? I believe NMaven would be technically capable of meeting your needs for a large project, but there are a couple of caveats. Between the stage of the project and the fact that it is incubating, it is essential to become involved in the community in some way to get the most out of it. I'd say if you have some time to put in here it will be repaid, but it does still require that investment at the moment. We currently only have one official release - 0.15. While this is much more suitable for some of your applications (since it is much more closely aligned to Maven's practices), it also lacks a lot of the features that are present in 0.14-SNAPSHOT. While we're working on (and looking for volunteers) to get involved in migrating that to the trunk now, using it now requires building an inhouse release and being involved here as you mentioned in a later question. I hope that helps clear it up. Cheers, Brett -- Brett Porter [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blogs.exist.com/bporter/
