Why use NAnt?
Of course you can build from within Visual Studio, but as described above, build tools like NAnt offer you much more power and flexibility. For starters, NAnt doesn’t require Visual Studio .NET. As long as you have the .NET Framework, you can do builds. Here is a partial list of things you can do with NAnt: • Use its built-in support for CVS updates and checkouts to automatically get the latest source files • Use it to configure builds • Use it to compile .NET languages, including C#, VB.Net and J# • Use it’s built in support for NUnit to automatically run unit tests • Use it’s built in support for NDoc to automatically create documentation from source code comments (currently C# only) • Use it to copy non-code output files to the build directory • Use it to package builds into .zip files (or even .msi files) for deployment Additionally, NAnt is extensible. It allows you to write your own tasks (tasks are described later in this article) or to use the