NAnt or MSBuild, which one to choose and when?

Question

I am aware there are other NAnt and MSBuild related questions on Stack Overflow, but I could not find a direct comparison between the two and so here is the question.

Answer 1

Personally, I use both - for the same project.

MSBuild is great at building Visual Studio solutions and projects - that's what it's made for.

NAnt is more easily hand-editable, in my opinion - particularly if you already know Ant. NAnt can call MSBuild very easily with NAntContrib. So, I hand-craft a NAnt script to do things like copying built files, cleaning up etc - and call MSBuild to do the actual "turn my C# source code into assemblies" part.

If you want an example of that, look at my Protocol Buffers build file. (I wouldn't claim it's a fabulous NAnt script, but it does the job.)