Question

Maven had a long history and is well supported in the Java world. NMaven has received a less successful start and has never become as popular in the C#/.NET world as its larger cousin was in the Java world. The project seems close to dead(ish), but maybe I’m wrong.

Are there alternatives that, preferably using NAnt, are commonly used in favor of NMaven and have similar properties as Maven? What I’m looking for is a good open source automatic build server for .NET, if any exists. Or should I continue using NMaven?

Answer 1

MAven is more a repository manager than a CI/Build setup.

If you’re looking for continuous integration servers, here are the ones I know of:

• CruiseControl.Net (http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CCNET/Welcome+to+CruiseControl.NET) Good enough, free, but can be a resource hog and configuration is sometimes maddening.
• Hudson ( http://hudson-ci.org/ ) has some pretty good .Net specific tasks. As a open source/free automatic build setup I tend to favor it over CruiseControl.Net. It needs Java to run, but it runs fine on Windows. The web dashboard is nice (albeit with that strange fetish for blue instead of green) and project configuration is a breeze (compared to CCNet…)
• TeamCity (JetBrains) (http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/) is really good, offers a lot of interesting features (private remote builds before committing, distributed build agents, etc.) and nice VS.Net integration. You have to pay for a license but it’s free for small teams.

All of these support the most popular SCM (CVS, SVN) Hudson and TeamCity support Mercurial and Git.

I’d go for Hudson or TeamCity.