What are some good resources to learn to use NAnt?

Question

I've never used an automated build system - to be honest, I've never had a use for it since I work as a solo developer (not by choice) and do development only on my workstation, so using the Build menu in Visual Studio has been good enough for me.

I'm trying to learn more good software engineering practices, and continuous integration is one of them. However, I know that I need to use an automated build script to set up a CI environment, but I've never used one and don't know where to begin.

I've heard that NAnt is the really good one (although MSBuild is similar?) that most professional developers use. What are some good resources to properly learn how to use NAnt?

Answer 1

The best place to start learning is to just dig in on a small project and refer back to the NAnt User Manual.

Outside of doing that, here are a few places I've found helpful in the past:

• Mailing Lists (sourceforge)
• NAnt Starter Series (Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo)
• A Brief Introduction to NAnt (4 Guys From Rolla)
• Managing .NET Development with NAnt

Answer 2

A resource that helped me, was looking at some actual projects that others have created. Pick some projects that use .NET and NAnt, download source, and look at their build files and how they organize them. This might shed some light on why you would want to use certain things and some tips and tricks.

Example projects that were useful for me to look at their NAnt build procedures:

• NAnt, they have NAnt files to build the whole thing, who else would it be best to learn from?
• NUnit
• SharpZipLib

Answer 3

We are putting together a few good screen casts on Nant over at http://dimecasts.net/Casts/ByTag/NAnt