NAnt vs MSBuild funnies

[singalen]

Originally published at Fiberglass flowers. You can comment here or there.

All the software is equally bad…

Well, I know some pieces of software that are good, but I won’t mention them today.

One of our msbuild vs nant choice criteria is  a product versioning support.

Sad or funny things are:

• both don’t include sane tool out of box;
• both need installing NAntContrib or MSBuild Community Tasks;
• even then both can’t sanely write AssemblyInfo.cs in order to leave other properties intact; if you had InternalsVisibleTo satellite unit test assembly - it won’t build then;

NAntContrib Version task is way more functional.

Additionally, MSDN page design where MSBuild reference manual lives, is awful.

I wonder if it’s the reason to choose a build tool, while they are approximately equal.

OTOH, MSBuild has a great GenerateBootstrapper task to install .NET framework from MSI (WiX sample included in the referenced wiki).