By Oleg Zhukov on 10/21/2007 2:14 PM

Sometimes building a software product from the source code requires more than just compiling. That is the case especially for big software systems where the build process consists of numerous steps.

A long long time ago (don't ask when :) the MAKE utility appeared to solve this problem. It offered a rather powerful scripting language for describing the build process. But time went by and new utilities came to substitute MAKE. They didn't have the drawbacks peculiar to MAKE and used XML as a script format. One of such tools was Ant and its .NET clone named NAnt. Microsoft suggested their own build tool too (well, that was expected :) under MSBuild name. Here I would not devle into MSBuild and Ant comparison, but I am going to list the things that really make MSBuild attractive compared to NAnt:

• Tight integartion with Visual Studio IDE. Actually VS projects are MSBuild scripts. And modifying the project means just modifying the MSBuild script. An ... Read More »
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By Oleg Zhukov on 6/10/2007 4:32 AM

The majority of .NET developers are still sitting on 1.1 and 2.0 versions and are thinking of all those troubles they will meet moving to 3.0 and 3.5. However there are no reasons for pessimism since 3.0 and 3.5 are based on 2.0 and utilize the same CLR 2.0 version. This is the case when 3.5 - 2.0 < 1.5. In his recent post Daniel Moth explains this in detail. The difference between VS2005 and upcoming VS2008 is not as much either. See another Moth's post about VS2008 stack.