I mentioned a couple days ago that my current project is based on a C# and ASP.NET. I don’t have access to Visual Studio (should I try to get it? is it worth it?) so I’ve been using the Improv C# plugin with Eclipse. The combination works alright, but there are a couple things that need improvement. First, when compiling an assembly in C#, you have to specify each module that it references per class, there isn’t a way to to say that MyProject.dll should be included in the classpath for the entire C# project. Second, there’s no way to say that you want all the compiled assemblies to be placed in ../classes/ instead of ../build (ie: you can’t specify an output folder). But that’s where NAnt comes to the rescue. I downloaded NAnt today and was able to get a build script running within a couple minutes that accomplishes the two things I needed above.

I do have a question for those of you who have done .NET programming before. In Java, you compile .java files to .class files. Using C#, you compile a .cs file to a .dll (or .exe, etc..) which is called an assembly. Then in Java you’d usually package up your class files into a jar file. After using NAnt today, I see that you can compile a bunch of .cs files into a single dll, also called an assembly, which you can then use just like a jar file. Do I have that right? Are there different ways of doing this?