Dotnet Ant Library

Introduction

This is a library of Ant tasks that support using .NET executables accross different platforms and in particular support using common .NET development tools like NAnt or NUnit from within Ant.

Requirements

The current version requires Ant 1.6.2 or later and may even work better for a CVS build of Ant created from CVS HEAD.

Where is it?

The source code for the library currently lives in the developer sandbox in Ant's CVS - http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/ant/proposal/sandbox/dotnet/. A binary can be found at http://cvs.apache.org/~bodewig/dotnet/dotnet.jar. A zip file containing the docs is also available.

Note that these are temporary locations and may change later.

Feedback

Right now direct any feedback either directly to me or the Ant developer list.

Installation

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

There are several ways to use the tasks:

The traditional way:

          <taskdef 
            resource="org/apache/tools/ant/taskdefs/optional/dotnet/antlib.xml">
            <classpath>
              <pathelement location="YOUR-PATH-TO/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.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.dotnet"
            resource="org/apache/tools/ant/taskdefs/optional/dotnet/antlib.xml">
            <classpath>
              <pathelement location="YOUR-PATH-TO/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.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.dotnet"
            xmlns="antlib:org.apache.tools.ant">
            ...
            <dn:nant>
              <dn:target name="my-target"/>
            </dn:nant>

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

or a variation thereof.

Using Ant's autodiscovery. Place 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.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.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

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.
nant - execute the NAnt build tool.
msbuild - execute the MSBuild build tool, untested.
wix - execute the WiX toolset, untested.
nunit - execute the nunit-console.exe NUnit test runner.