> Reason: One of the most common complaints I hear about NAnt is that its > too hard to use, even though it oozes power and flexibility. A lot of > people run with Visual Build from Kinook (another fine product), but I > think some kind of designer support would give NAnt the edge.
Yeah, Alex Lowe wrote a column essentially saying just that, ironically in an argument for why .net needs a new build system. On the other hand, one of the great features of both nant and it's predecesor, ant, was that task writers have an easy time of it writing new tasks. But, building an designer interface, applicable to any sort of task, especially trying to accomplish that across platforms, is not a trivial effort. I've also been studying this. I have seen a few different approaches, NAntPad included. And honestly, none of them excites me at all. Let's say we could accomplish this with the core tasks, itself a challenge. Would any tool that was to expose the designer then have to have a text based interface for those task that didn't support the designer? How would that work? I noticed recently a reference to a previous conclusion that the task properties were probably not enough to build a designer themselves, which leads to your conclusion that each task writer should support a designer. I've come to the conclusion that a text interface makes more sense for editing build files. But, it should be a much better text interface than notepad. I've just started playing with the text editor in SharpDevelop, using example code from a nifty little tool called SqlBuddy. SqlBuddy provides intellisense sytle help for sql editing, and I think nant files could benefit from the same thing with the help of properties, a code snippet with all required fields, and a schema from the task builder. I think we can assume that almost everyone that creates a build file is a developer or system administrator type for whom text interfaces are not unfamiliar. And we all are happy with good editors that provide lots of context sensitive help, searching, designers that generate some of the code and provide intuitive navigation and feedback. For me, this would be preferable. As for those that may *use* a build file, as opposed to edt it, a tool I have been working on makes that part really easy. Hopefully, I'll get my updated version past the vaporware stage in the next couple of weeks. I took a detour to try and really understand windows forms and docking a lot better, but I'm close to something useful. ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ nant-developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nant-developers
