How i start with msbuild & nant for autobuild

Question

I m new for msbuild & nant. How i start this in my envronment : .net3.5

Answer 1

I think you are confused with the two, they are both mutually exclusive. Nant is an open source build framework that targets different versions of .NET. MSBuild on the other hand is bundled by Visual Studio.

Both tools do build the assemblies from the command line and can do numerous sophisticated things such as depositing the build into a folder that you specify. They both use XML to specify targets, compiler options and so on.

The best thing to do is to decide on which to use first and stick with it but it would help to have exposure to both tools. Then read up on it, there are numerous articles and documentation likewise to be found. For NAnt, there's an offline html documents that you can download to read, for MSBuild, there's a wealth of documents found on MSDN.

Hope this helps, Best regards, Tom.

Answer 2

Msbuild works on project files, and if you have the .Net framework installed then you already have it. You can invoke it with a command like this:

 C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\MSBuild.exe myProjectFile.proj

there are a whole bunch of options that go with it, using the command line

MSBuild.exe /?

will give you a good list and basic doco on them.