Dotnet Ant Library

Introduction

This is a library of Ant tasks that support using .NET executables accross different platforms and in particular support using common .NET development tools like NAnt from within Ant.

Requirements

The current version will only work for a CVS build of Ant created from CVS HEAD (i.e. after Ant 1.6's feature freeze) of 2003-11-27 or later. A version that can work with Ant 1.6 may be provided at a later stage. This task library is never going to work with Ant < 1.6.

Installation

If you are building this from sources, run the antlib target and you'll get a file dotnet.jar. If you've downloaded dotnet.jar, you are already ready.

There are several ways to use the tasks:

The traditional way:

          <taskdef 
            resource="org/apache/tools/ant/taskdefs/optional/dotnet/antlib.xml">
            <classpath>
              <pathelement location="YOUR-PATH-TO/dotnet.jar"/>
            </classpath>
          </taskdef>

With this you can use the tasks like plain Ant tasks, they'll live in the default namespace. I.e. if you can run <exec> without any namespace prefix, you can do so for <dotnetexec> as well.

Similar, but assigning a namespace URI

          <taskdef 
            uri="antlib:org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.dotnet"
            resource="org/apache/tools/ant/taskdefs/optional/dotnet/antlib.xml">
            <classpath>
              <pathelement location="YOUR-PATH-TO/dotnet.jar"/>
            </classpath>
          </taskdef>

This puts you task into a separate namespace than Ant's namespace. You would use the tasks like

          <project
            xmlns:dn="antlib:org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.dotnet"
            xmlns="antlib:org.apache.tools.ant">
            ...
            <dn:nant>
              <dn:target name="my-target"/>
            </dn:nant>

          <nant xmlns="antlib:org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.dotnet">
            <target name="my-target"/>
          </nant>

or a variation thereof.

Using Ant's autodiscovery. Place dotnet.jar into a directory and use ant -lib DIR-CONTAINING-THE-JAR or copy it into ANT_HOME/lib - and then in your build file, simply declare the namespace on the project tag:
```
          <project
            xmlns:dn="antlib:org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.dotnet"
            xmlns="antlib:org.apache.tools.ant">
        
```
And all tasks of this library will automatically be available in the dn namespace without any taskdef.

Tasks

dotnetexec - run a .NET assembly that's in your PATH. You can chose the framework that is going to be used - defaults to Mono on non-Windows platforms and Microsoft's on Windows.
nant - execute the NAnt build tool.
msbuild - execute the MSBuild build tool, untested.
wix - execute the WiX toolset, untested.