Why is there no need for Maven in .NET?

Question

I have the impression, that in the .NET-world, there is no real need for a Maven-like tool.

I am aware that there is Byldan and NMaven (is it still alive?), but I have not yet seen a real-world project that uses them.

Also in most .NET projects I have worked on, there never was voiced an need for a Maven-like tool. The problems Maven maven is addressing (automatic dependency-resolution, conventions based build structure ...) seem not to be so important in .NET.

Is my perception correct?

Why is this the case?

What are people really using in .NET? No automatic dependency resolution at all?

Are they writing their own build tools?

Is anybody using Maven itself, to manage their .NET projects? Is this a good choice?

What are your experiences?

Answer 1

For artifact dependency resolving, I'd say Nuget is now the preferred alternative. It supports and promotes build time resolution, i.e. no need to check in binary dependency artifacts into vcs. See these articles.

From version 2.7 of Nuget, build time resolution has even better support with the command Nuget restore being one of the options.

Update: There is now an alternative, nuget compatible package manager available - Paket that is better than the vanilla nuget client at handling transient dependencies and harmonising dependencies between projects in the same solution. The tooling seems to be pretty mature as well (VS integration and command line tooling for CI)

Answer 2

Maven is being pushed by apache projects, which are a core part of the huge java open source infrastructure. The widespread adoption of maven must be related to this, and the current level of maturity (quality) is also very good.

I don't think the .NET open source world has any significantly big open source actors to push such a concept through. Somehow .NET always seems to wait for redmond for these things.