Jeffrey Palermo 4:26 pm on December 8, 2007  

New NAnt beta release supports .Net 3.5/Silverlight – v0.86 beta 1

My company uses a combination of NAnt and MSBuild for build automation and some deployments.  We use MSBuild for purely Microsoft tool execution, like compiling.  We use NAnt for everything else, like moving files, packing the release, versioning, and everything else under the sun.  This solution is working very well for us, and I’ve used NAnt in major scenarios for over two years now. 

I’m very happy to share that the team has just released beta1 of version 0.86.  Go to the NAnt website to download it now or you can download it more directly here.  Read the full release notes here, but I want to highlight the more interesting things that came down the NAnt users list:

Support matrix for NAnt 0.86 beta 1

Framework                     Target      Runtime
—————————————————-
.NET Framework 1.0              *            *
.NET Framework 1.1              *            *
.NET Framework 2.0              *            *
.NET Framework 3.5              *            *
.NET Compact Framework 1.0      *
.NET Compact Framework 2.0      *
Mono 1.0 Profile                *            *
Mono 2.0 Profile                *            *
Mono 3.5 Profile                *            *
Moonlight 2.0                   *
Shared Source CLI 1.0           *
Silverlight 2.0                 *

 

To me, the big ones are .Net 3.5 and Silverlight 2.0 support.  Up to now (it’s only been a few weeks since .Net 3.5 was released) I used my own modification to the NAnt config file to make the build work with .Net 3.5, but I’ve pulled that out and am now using the beta 1 release.

For those wondering whether they should use it:  I just upgraded the MvcContrib open source project, and our build worked just fine.  It’s not hard to find out if there are any issues with your build.  Drop it in and run the build.  If there are any problems, revert your working copy. 

I would like to publicly express appreciation for the developers who are working on NAnt.  There are lots of users of the tool out there, including me, and I thank you for your contributions to the developer community.