Dissecting NAnt

Summary

Without even delving into the tasks of NAnt to any great degree, we can see already that there is significant power and flexibility afforded to the erstwhile developer through the configuration and organization possibilities of the build scripts for NAnt.

We can run NAnt scripts with our desired command-line options. We have looked at the core features of a build script and feel confident in meddling with these and applying their various attributes. Additionally, we have looked at two specific tasks that provide significant additional flexibility in script structure. We understand how dependencies between targets work, and how inheritance between build scripts works.

On a practical level, we have considered how we might structure our own build script for our solutions. We have considered the core activities that need to occur as part of our build process and we at least have a “v1” skeleton of the build and deploy files.