Most product architects using NAnt have never delved into its precursor, Ant. The converse is true as well. After spending some time researching Ant I have a few thoughts (gasp):

• Ant and NAnt share 99% of core design principles.
• It is critical to understand the 1% in which they differ.
• You can design equivalent steps in each.
• Ant is a more feature-rich tool (filter, filtersets, scoped properties).
• Neither tool protects you from poor organization and/or componentization.

One of the consisent issues I see in (N)Ant build design is poor practices. This is propagated by poor user-guidance and lack of best-practices. Aside from some purportedly good books, there is not much to go on. Ask 10 architects how they designed their build framework and 9 will tell you they used the approach that [product x] used.

So for the next few posts I will contrast various approaches to build design - hopefully extracting some best-practices in the end. The first step will be to point out what is wrong with this build script.