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 ended up using both. When redesigning our build system, I was facing a tricky problem. Namely, I couldn't get rid of .vcproj (and family) because we everybody was using VS to update the project files, settings, and configurations. So without a huge duplication and error prone process, we couldn't base our build system on a new set of files.

For this reason, I decided to keep the 'proj' files of VS and use MSBuild (they are MSBuild files, at least VS2005 and VS2008 use MSBuild project files). For everything else (custom configuration, unit testing, packaging, preparing documentation...) I used NAnt.

For continuous integration, I used CruiseControl. So we had CC scripts that triggered NAnt jobs, which for building used MSBuild.

One final note: MSBuild does NOT support Setup projects! So you're stuck with calling DevEnv.com or using Visual Studio directly. That's what I ended up doing, but I disabled the setup project by default from all solution configurations, since developers wouldn't normally need to build them, and if they do, they can manually select to build them.