NAnt - really?

Written by Brett Veenstra

So I’m looking at taking JPB’s advice on a Visual Studio project setup and his reference to using NAnt for his normal builds - even small projects. I’ve seen reference to NAnt for years now and am still having trouble thinking this is just overkill for a “small” standard project.

I’m running a VS2005 project with 8 projects and my compile only takes 3 minutes. I know people have claimed orders of magnitude of build time improvement, but it still seems strange to go through the hassle of creating and maintaining XML when I decide I need to breakout the project into another assembly… if this were going the way of Continuous Integration, I could see the benefits there, but would the .build file have to be different on the CI server (e.g. SVN Update, clean, test targets).

What am I missing for the small development project?

Update: My apologies to JPB on the assumption he suggested all projects run NAnt. I’m still curious, is it overkill to use NAnt, Rake, etc for compiling a solution with less than 20 projects / 10,000 lines of code?