Almost three years ago I started to experiment with improved support for .NET development int Ant. It started with support for NAnt and MSBuild - in theory by that time, since MSBuild wasn't available to me. Back then I started with more serious C# development on Mono and the real goal was to be able to drive the whole development of a mixed language project from within Ant.
It's first "micro-release" was more or less an attempt to store a snapshot of my work somewhere other than my hard disk - and strangely to me I received feedback pretty soon. It seemed I wasn't the only one crossing platform boundaries and wanting to stick with Ant.
About a year later, I added NUnit support, which was a real step forward for me since it allowed me to remove NAnt (as much as I liked it) from the build process completely. All development was happening using Mono on MacOS X by that time, I wasn't even sure it work on Microsoft platforms until Steve reported success.
When we started the Antlibs subproject, the .NET tasks were among the first to be added to the sandbox and among the first to be promoted from sandbox to proper. It probably was the first one to receive a bug report as well.
In the mean time I've switched jobs and Microsoft's .NET framework is the primary (but not sole) development platform during the day. This means that the MSBuild and wix tasks have now been tested and actually work.
It also means Mono isn't getting as much testing as I'd like. Yesterday we've released the first beta release of the Ant library, even though Gump says the wsdltodotnet tests are failing on Mono. This should be addressed before the final release, but more testers are not only welcome, you are severely needed.
path: /en/Apache/Ant/dotnet | #