When I was first introduced to NAnt a
few years ago, I was delighted to find a community of “grass roots” tasks built for
NAnt in the NAnt Contrib open
source project. This tasks found within this project range from ones
that individuals find useful for a proprietary problem to genuine candidates for inclusion
in the main project. Indeed, the majority of new tasks added to the main NAnt
project originate with the NAnt Contrib group.
I find it almost hilarious that there is an open source project that caters to code
that isn’t yet approved for the “real” open source project. Is it just me or
has open source gone corporate? 🙂 Regardless, the NAnt Contrib group proved
to be an invaluable resource for several major build projects that I encountered.
I am now delving into MSBuild and am overjoyed to find a similar community of expansion-minded
contributors in the MS
Build Tasks project at Tigris. A common complaint when MS Build released
was its low number of out-of-the-box tasks compared to NAnt. The fundamentals
were there, like file copying, compiling, zipping, etc., but nothing imaginative.
A quick scan of the custom tasks available in the MS Build Tasks project reveals some
fun additions. RegEx, SVN, SQL, and IIS related tasks are among my favorites.
Hopefully the MS Build Team will see this as a source of good ideas and product feature
enhancements like the primary development group for NAnt. Nothing succeeds quite
so well as community driven feature sets.