NAnt is one of the two most commonly used automated build tools for .NET projects, the other being MSBuild. Using it rather than Visual Studio directly means that you can

• Run scheduled or triggered builds for your project
• Run any number of pre- and post-build events on your code, such as unit testing, code analysis and code metrics packages.

and all without a sniff of Visual Studio. NAnt is a free, open source project downloadable from http://nant.sourceforge.net. Its build scripts are written as XML documents and can be automated or run manually as appropriate. You can find the reference manual here.

MbUnit includes code for a custom <mbunit> NAnt task which makes the running of unit tests through MbUnit and subsequent report generation much more straightforward. To get this working, you’ll need to

1. Copy the following DLLs from the MbUnit installation directory to the NAnt bin directory.
   • MbUnit.Tasks.dll
   • MbUnit.Framework.dll
   • QuickGraph.dll
   • QuickGraph.Algorithms.dll
   If you’ve used other MbUnit DLLs in your test code, you’ll need to include those as well, but these four are the minimum.
2. Include the <mbunit> task in one of your nAnt scripts. For example, the following script runs the tests in FizzBuzzTests.dll, creates a HTML report of the test run and saves it in the current directory.
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   <project default="tests">
      <target name="tests">
         <mbunit
            report-types="Html"
            report-filename-format="myreport{0}{1}"
            report-output-directory=".">
            <assemblies>
               <include name="FizzBuzzTests.dll" /> 
            </assemblies>
         </mbunit>
      </target>
   </project>

3. Run the build script.

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<mbunit
   [report-types="testType"]
   [report-filename-format="reportName"]
   report-output-directory="reportDirectory">
   <assemblies>
      <include name="testAssembly" />
      [<include name="testAssembly" /> ...]
   </assemblies> </mbunit>

<mbunit> has the following attributes:

• report-types : Specifies what type of report will be generated after the test run. testType is one of the following types - html, text, xml, dox. The default is html.
• report-filename-format : Specifies the name of the test report file being generated. By default, reportName is set to “mbunit-result-{0}{1}” where {0} is replaced by a long datetime string and {1} is replaced by the time (on a 24hr clock).
• report-output-directory : Specifies the directory where the test report file will be saved. reportDirectory can be either an absolute path or relative to the current directory when NAnt is run. Note that this attribute is mandatory and must be given a value.

It also inherits the following attributes from the core NAnt Task element:

• failonerror : Determines if task failure (ie. any unit tests failing) stops the build, or is just reported. The default is true
• verbose : Determines whether the task should report detailed build log messages. The default is false.
• if : If true then the task will be executed; otherwise, skipped. The default is true.
• unless : Opposite of if. If false then the task will be executed; otherwise, skipped. The default is false.

<mbunit> has one child element, <assemblies>. This must be included in the task. The name and location of each test file to be run by MbUnit must be included here. The example here uses individual child <include> elements here, but is subject to the same syntax rules as the NAnt fileset type.