Recent news from the NAnt project team about the upcoming release may have you recalling a classic scene from Monty Python and The Holy Grail with NAnt being the not-quite-dead person saying: "I'm getting better. I don't want to go on the cart."

For anyone who uses NAnt in their build process, this release is great news for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that the project is active again, and very much so it would appear. If you are like me, you were probably a bit worried that the project would be (or had been) abandoned and you would have to learn a new build tool for your process. Well, as I wrote in an article in July of last year entitled "Is NAnt Dead?", project activity was evident at that point as we could see updates being committed to source and responses to bug reports. So the hope we felt then has been vindicated and we can breathe a small sigh of relief as the project once again marches onward.

According to a short article on the front page of the MSDN Subscriptions Home page, the full Microsoft Expression Studio 3 is now available to premium MSDN subscribers. This is great news as the first 2 releases of this design tool only had certain portions of the product available to MSDN subscribers (Blend and Web if I recall correctly) and now we get the full complement of functionality via our subscription. While I didn't use the version 1.x at all, I have had the opportunity to use Expression Web 2 for a couple of projects, and I've found the design elements of the tool very useful. It's compliance to HTML, XHTML, and CSS standards made my work of creating simple web interfaces rather easy and I recommend any developer who has an opportunity to check out the new release to do so.

Here's what the full package of the new release offers:

What is NAntBuilder?

(Excerpt from NAntBuilder Website)

NAntBuilder is a full-featured Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for NAnt, the popular process-automating tool. It is designed to be a powerful NAnt script creator, editor, and debugger. 

NAntBuilder enables you to manage your build process easily, allowing you to focus on more interesting and important works. Its full-featured code completion will save you thousands of keystrokes while authoring NAnt script. And the integrated NAnt script debugger will help you execute NAnt script task by task. With all these features, NAntBuilder provides a flexible, easy-to-use platform to author, debug and execute NAnt script.

I've recently been involved in a project to automate windows software builds at my organization and take the first steps toward continuous integration. This is a project that actually started back in mid 2006 with an evaluation of available build tools, but was shelved after the initial research due to resources and lack of infrastructure to support the new process. When we picked up the project again this year, we decided to use NAnt as our build tool of choice based on the research we did in the initial project and the fact that the continuous integration server had native support. However, a few weeks into the project I was doing some research and found that most of the articles I found regarding NAnt were… Well… Old.

So I started to wonder, "Is the NAnt project dead?"