NAnt or TFS build which is better?

Question

There was a question about Msbuild and NAnt advantages and disadvantages. Now let's see which is better TFS Build(with msbuild) or NAnt. In my opinion NAnt because you can easily move the building environment in few seconds to another machine (depends on copying files), also it's easier to manage, much faster to debug and it's not integrated with Team Foundation Server, what do You think?

Answer 1

It's worth noting that "TFS Build" (actually named "Team Build") uses the MSBUILD engine that's part of the Windows SDK now. It's a free engine into which you can plug custom tasks, and there's a community of users who have done just that. See

• http://www.codeplex.com/sdctasks
• http://www.codeplex.com/MSBuildExtensionPack

among many others.

MSBUILD is very mature, having been part of .NET since version 2.0. It could hardly be any more widely-used, as it is the build engine that builds all C# and VB.NET projects from the Visual Studio IDE.

It also comes with an API, with which you can programmatically control builds, do custom logging, etc.

Answer 2

I have used both. We have moved from Cruise Control / Nant to TFS.

The big benefit and the reason why we moved is the integration and reporting possibilities.

Nant is easier to work with for simple projects. But if you have a large environment and you look at it as your software development process, not just a build server, then I find TFS much better.

Just use what make you the most productive.