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.

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?"