Nant vs Ant: Functions

by simpsonjulian on March 3, 2008

I’ve been writing (and fixing other people’s) Ant build files for about 5 years now. In that time I never really touched Nant much. My assumption was that Nant was a faithful reproduction of Ant, but with .NET specific tasks rather than Java tasks. That was a hasty assumption. In fact, it’s wrong. This is the first of a few posts about the differences.

One of the first things that struck me was the lack of tasks in Nant. I was a bit taken aback. But that was before I discovered functions. Functions are nice. Functions means you don’t need so many tasks. For example, you can do throw in a function to get the parent directory of a file so rather than execute a task.

In summary: Nice. Really helpful and I wish someone would port them to Ant. More info at the Nant site: Link

Share with the group:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • DZone
  • LinkedIn
  • Slashdot
  • StumbleUpon

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Leave a Comment

You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Previous post: "It even works on your computer!"

Next post: Build Pattern: Amnesiac CI Build