Introduction

The Apache .NET Ant Library™ is a library of Apache Ant™ tasks developed by The Apache Software Foundation that support using .NET executables accross different platforms and in particular support using common .NET development tools like NAnt or NUnit from within Ant.

The original .NET support from Ant's core has also been moved to this library.

Requirements

The current version requires Ant 1.7.0 or later.

Where is it?

The source code for the library lives in Ant's SVN - http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/antlibs/dotnet/trunk/, binary and source distributions are available available from the Ant website: source and binary.

Feedback

Please use Ant's issue tracker for bug reports, choose "Ant" as the product and ".NET Antlib" as the category. The hints about reporting bugs certainly apply to this Ant library as well.

For questions about this Ant library use the user or dev mailing list of the Ant project. You must be subscribed to the list in order to post a question.

Installation

If you are building this from sources, run the antlib target and you'll get a file ant-dotnet.jar. If you've downloaded a binary release, you are already there.

There are several ways to use the tasks:

• The traditional way:

            <taskdef 
              resource="org/apache/ant/dotnet/antlib.xml">
              <classpath>
                <pathelement location="YOUR-PATH-TO/ant-dotnet.jar"/>
              </classpath>
            </taskdef>
          

  With this you can use the tasks like plain Ant tasks, they'll live in the default namespace. I.e. if you can run <exec> without any namespace prefix, you can do so for <dotnetexec> as well.
• Similar, but assigning a namespace URI

            <taskdef 
              uri="antlib:org.apache.ant.dotnet"
              resource="org/apache/ant/dotnet/antlib.xml">
              <classpath>
                <pathelement location="YOUR-PATH-TO/ant-dotnet.jar"/>
              </classpath>
            </taskdef>
          

  This puts you task into a separate namespace than Ant's namespace. You would use the tasks like

            <project
              xmlns:dn="antlib:org.apache.ant.dotnet"
              xmlns="antlib:org.apache.tools.ant">
              ...
              <dn:nant>
                <dn:target name="my-target"/>
              </dn:nant>
          

  or

            <nant xmlns="antlib:org.apache.ant.dotnet">
              <target name="my-target"/>
            </nant>
          

  or a variation thereof.
• Using Ant's autodiscovery. Place ant-dotnet.jar into a directory and use ant -lib DIR-CONTAINING-THE-JAR or copy it into ANT_HOME/lib - and then in your build file, simply declare the namespace on the project tag:

            <project
              xmlns:dn="antlib:org.apache.ant.dotnet"
              xmlns="antlib:org.apache.tools.ant">
          

  And all tasks of this library will automatically be available in the dn namespace without any taskdef.

Tasks

• The old code .NET tasks including C#, VB.NET and J# compiler tasks.
• dotnetexec - run a .NET assembly that's in your PATH. You can chose the framework that is going to be used - defaults to Mono on non-Windows platforms and Microsoft's on Windows.
• fsc - F# compiler task.
• nant - execute the NAnt build tool.
• msbuild - execute the MSBuild build tool of Microsoft's .NET framework 2.0.
• wix - execute candle and/or light of the WiX toolset.
• tallow - execute tallow of the WiX toolset.
• nunit - execute the nunit-console.exe NUnit test runner.

Apache Ant, Apache .NET Ant Library, Ant, .NET Ant Library, Apache, the Apache feather logo, and the Apache Ant project logos are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation.