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

I use both in that my NAnt scripts call MSBuild. My main reason for staying with NAnt is isolation. Let me explain why I feel this is important:

1. Adding dependencies to your project. The NAnt build file is alien to Visual Studio (in my case I consider this a pro) so Visual Studio does not attempt to do anything with it. MSBuild tasks are embedded so part of the solution and can refer to other MSBuild tasks. I've received source code from someone else only to find out I could not build, because the MSBuild community tasks were not installed. What I find particularly frustrating is that Visual Studio just would not build and threw a bunch of errors that made me loose time debugging. This, despite the fact that the build being requested could have gone ahead (as a debug build for instance) without some of the extras of the MSBuild task. In short: I don't like adding dependencies to my project if I can avoid it.

2. I don't trust Visual Studio as far as I could throw its development team. This stems back to the early days of Visual Studio when it would massacre my HTML. I still do not use the designer for instance (at a conference recently I found colleagues did the same). I have found that Visual Studio can screw up dependencies and version numbers in the DLL file (I cannot replicate this, but it did happen in a project consistently and caused a lot of grief and lost time). I have resorted to a build procedure that uses Visual Studio to build in debug mode only. For production, I use NAnt so that I control everything externally. Visual Studio just cannot interfere any longer if I build using NAnt.

PS: I'm a web developer and do not do Windows Forms development.