Simon Thorneycroft and Jonathan Hodgson

Intellisense for your NAnt Builds

An oldy, but a goldy, this one...I have spent a good proportion of today refactoring the Cruise Control build scripts on my build server. The build, Nunit tests and FXCop reports are all providing useful improvement over the previous incarnation of the build scripts (We like making incremental improvements). 

Whilst I was updating the build script, a colleague happened to notice that I was getting intellisense for the NAnt and NAnt Contrib tasks within the Visual Studio .NET 2003 environment, something that I had set up quite some time ago.

Obviously, since everyone in the world doesn't know this yet I thought it would make a good blog entry, however, as usual someone beat me to the post (pun intended). The information you need to generate a full nant schema is here and in the feedback for the post you can learn where to place your newly generate XSD file.  What makes this approach so great is that it is no effort to regenerate the file and also it will include any other custom task types that NAnt is aware of.