RE: [Nant-users] General Nant Question

[Morris, Jason]

Title: General Nant Question

I have been using nAnt for quite some time to do all the things that you mentioned in your five steps, except for step 1.  I am sure it is possible, but have no experience doing it with nAnt.  I am not sure if I understand why you need to uninstall and install ASP.NET all the time, but I am sure you have your reasons.

 

My application uses web apps, web services, and window services and I have been able to make nAnt build and deploy all of these components.

 

I use nAnt 0.84 with Draco.NET 1.4 (another SourceForge project, http://draconet.sf.net).  Draco.NET handles starting builds, fetching code from the code repository and then emailing the results of the build, so I think you should check it out as well.  There is also CruiseControl.NET, but I have no experience with that product.

 

I haven't experience any maintenance problems with keeping my build files up-to-date.  I do not use the <solution /> task, so I do have to make changes to my build file whenever I add references to other assemblies, but I find nAnt such a benefit that it is worth this maintenance cost.

 

If your projects and solutions are changing rapidly, yes there can be a lot of maintenance, but on my project, the projects are well defined and not much changes about the build process.

 

There is a little bit of a learning curve in the beginning, but I found that once you have the build process defined and your build files created, it is a great benefit to your project.

 

Doing continuous integration with nAnt and Draco.NET has been a huge time savor on my project, plus the whole team has a lot of confidence with conducting builds because the whole build process is documented in the build script.  We can build and deploy our web apps, etc to production on Fridays without having to worry about the build breaking our application...now bugs in the code, that is another worry :)

 

Just my $.02.

 

Jason

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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bonnett, Evan A
Sent: Friday, March 05, 2004 7:27 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [Nant-users] General Nant Question

All,

I'm checking Nant out and am considering employing it for my application.  First, a little bit about my app...

The main app is a WinForms app.  There are 2 web services and a portal app as well.  All in all, there are 7 solutions containing somewhere around 20 projects or so.  The deployment consists of the following tasks:

1)shut down IIS and uninstall and reinstall asp.net
2)get all files from  VSS into a staging directory
3)label all projects in VSS
4)compile all projects and send an email
        a) in compile, if it's a web app or svc, copy all dlls and necessary files to virt dir
        b) if forms app, copy dll's into the reference dir for other projects to ref
5)clean up

Now, obviously, this is an over-simplification of the whole process but you get the jist.

My question is this:  I have heard that maintenance of build files can be an unwieldy task.  Is this true?  How do you handle it?  Given the information I have set forth above, does it sound like I can gain significant benefit from Nant?

Thanks,

Evan A. Bonnett
Reynolds and Reynolds, IT
ERA Integrated Desking Development
937-485-8577
58577