So I might end up trying to help out a project with their build and release process, but it's on Windows. My windows skills have no doubt atrophied a bit, but I do remember hearing about MSBuild. I thought to myself, hey it's been like a year or two since I remember hearing a lot about that, they must have some shipping code by now....
Nope, nothing not in beta. To boot, it's part of VS2005, which presumably isn't schedule until 2005 (at least). To kick extra sand in everyone's face, it doesn't support (and might not by relesae time) .NET framework 1.0 or 1.1. And finally, if it only supports .NET 2.0, it would seem that implies it only supports .NET at all, so are you out of luck for building native win32 stuff with it?
Anyway, I love the idea (of setting up your build once in an IDE and then getting a modifiable file that you can use to kick off automated builds) of the thing, but it's just vapor. Sigh. Hopefully Nant is okay...
Why do I have the strange, creeping suspicion that I'm going to be writing Makefiles again?
Update: Fixed nant link.
I worked on a medium sized (~50k loc, three devs, no builder) .net/c++ project and we used make (or was it nmake? small difference.). Anyway, there's nothing wrong with make on such a project. It doesn't scale to huge projects well (mainly because it ties your coding to your building) but it works fine. And if you're lucky enough to be working in a single language environment, it works even better. Don't get me started about building unmanaged dlls refed in managed code, or how to resolve circular dependencies...
However, it is extremely simple, and that can mean a lot for transparancy (and is something that is often missed by ant/nant zealots).
I don't know that much about MSBuild, but if your choices are between make, ant/nant, or VSone-million's built-in tool, I'd choose make in an instant. Yes, you can even automate it via shell scripts.
YMMV, of course.
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