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

While I'm not very familiar with MsBuild, I'm under the impression that some of key differences on both sides can be supplemented by additions:

• MsBuildTasks
• NantContrib

I recently had to build a Silverlight project in Nant. I discovered that life would be easier if I just did this with MsBuild - I ended up calling a MsBuild task from within a Nant script so I suppose it's not too out of the ordinary to mix and match the two.

Beyond that, I suppose it's going to be a question of personal preference - obviously you can manage some/most of MsBuild's functionality from within Visual Studio, if that's your thing. Nant seems more flexible and better suited if you prefer to write scripts by hand, and if you come from the Java world you'll likely be right at home with it.