sides of march (Brian DeMarzo)

A while back, I wrote a blog post, A quick introduction to Nant, which gave, well, a quick introduction to building C# libraries using NAnt.

Since then, I’ve been using NAnt to do a lot more — notably, to run unit tests and to report on test coverage (using NCover and NCoverExplorer). The usage is pretty straightforward, and I think you’ll see how each step builds on the previous step.

• To run a default build (excluding unit tests): nant
• To build all projects and unit tests (but don’t run : nant build-tests
• To build all projects and unit tests, and run tests using NUnit: nant test
• To build all projects and unit tests, and run tests using NCover to generate coverage reports: nant cover
• To build all projects and unit tests, run tests using NCover to generate coverage reports, and open those reports in NCoverExplorer: nant coverex

The sample below is my NAnt build file. A few notes first.

• There are only two projects referenced: Project1 and Project1.Tests. Repeat the appropriate sections to build against additional projects.
• nunit-console.exe is expected to be in the system path.
• nunit-console.exe, ncover.console.exe, and ncoverexplorer.exe are expected to be in the system path. I recommend you download and install TestDriven.Net to have all of these in a convenient place.

Now, on to the build file. It should be self-explanatory, but I added some XML comments for your convenience.

	Project -- NAnt Build
	
	

	
	

	
		
	

	
		
		
			
			
			
		
		
			<!-- I keep shared DLLs in a directory called References -->
			
				
				
			
		
	

	
		
			
				
			
			
				
				<!-- add additional references here -->
			
		
	

	
		
		
			
		
		
		
		
		<!-- add additional references here -->
		
		
		<!-- this copies your App.config to a file that can be found by NUnit when testing -->