NAnt is a free and open source

Free and open source software

Free and open-source software or free/libre/open-source software is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code...

 software

Computer software

Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....

 tool for automating software build

Software build

In the field of computer software, the term software build refers either to the process of converting source code files into standalone software artifact that can be run on a computer, or the result of doing so...

 processes. It is similar to Apache Ant

Apache Ant

Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes. It is similar to Make but is implemented using the Java language, requires the Java platform, and is best suited to building Java projects....

, but targeted at the .NET

.NET Framework

The .NET Framework is a software framework that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large library and supports several programming languages which allows language interoperability...

 environment rather than Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

. The name NAnt comes from the fact that the tool is Not Ant http://nant.sourceforge.net/release/latest/help/introduction/fog0000000042.html

NAnt requires one of the .NET frameworks (1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.5 or 4.0) or the third party Mono

Mono (software)

Mono, pronounced , is a free and open source project led by Xamarin to create an Ecma standard compliant .NET-compatible set of tools including, among others, a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime....

platform.

Front-ends

There are several front-end GUI tools available:

• NAntBuilder http://www.nantbuilder.com/, a full-featured Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for NAnt. It is designed to be a NAnt script creator, editor, and debugger.
• NAntGUI http://nantgui.berlios.de/, an open source tool for editing and running NAnt scripts.
• Nantpad, a commercial tool by Profusion Software Studios that allows authoring, browsing and executing NAnt scripts.
• ColorNAnt http://colornant.googlepages.com/, The Perl script ColorNAnt is a wrapper for 'NAnt' and produces the same output but with pretty 'syntax' highlighting. Color schemes can be customized.
• NantMenu http://nantmenu.codeplex.com, a Windows Shell Extension allowing you to run NAnt build scripts directly from within Windows Explorer.

External links

• NAnt Project Home Page
• Built in Tasks
• http://nantgui.berlios.de/ - a front-end for NAnt.
• NAntContrib - NAnt extension
• ColorNAnt - a tool to colorize 'NAnt' output
• NAntMenu - a windows shell extension to run NAnt build scripts