NAnt is a build tool for .NET projects. As can be deduced from the name, it is similar to Ant, which we covered in Chapter 4, TeamCity for Java Projects. The motivations behind NAnt are the same as that of Ant. For example, like Ant, one of the main motivations for NAnt is to be a cross-platform build tool. NAnt can be used in Windows as well as Unix-based operating systems like Linux.
Note
While Ant itself could be used for .NET projects too, NAnt comes with out-of-the-box support to build .NET projects. Moreover, NAnt can be extended using .NET-based languages that the team might already be familiar with, rather than using Java. Also, obviously, there is no need for a JVM runtime when using NAnt, and only .NET or Mono is required for it.
The NAnt distribution can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/nant/files/nant/0.92/nant-0.92-bin.zip/download.
The ZIP file can be extracted using a tool like 7-Zip or WinRar on Windows. The...