NAnt, NUnit, and NDoc... the hard way
I live and die these days by the holy trinity. NAnt, NUnit, and NDoc. They're lifesavers when it comes to automating builds, doing testing, and quickly generating API docs for your code (which helps if you're passing it off to another group for support).
However I'm screwed right now with these tools and stuck to using the command line (which is ok because I grew up out of that world). For NUnit, I was using the NUnit add-in which was great but then it "evolved" into TestDriven.NET. Great. A nice MSI package that you can install and now you can right click on test and run it. The output window shows you any tests that failed and a double-click on it will take you to the offending test. Only problem is that I run it and get yelled at that my version is old. Checking the Download page the last few weeks I've been getting nothing but an error page with an ICAP Error (whatever that is). The download page just doesn't seem to come up for me no matter where I'm trying it from.
The other bee in my bonet is NAntRunner. NAnt is a great tool and our build script kicks (as much as a build script can). However I always have a console window open to run NAnt so work in the VS.NET IDE, switch to command window, run NAnt, lather, rinse, repeat. Okay, I could add NAnt to my Tools menu but it just opens a window and runs so it's hard to see when something goes wrong. Plus I would have to do something funky so I could specify different targets, etc. NAntRunner is a nice looking add-in that is supposed to recognize your .build file and will let you (graphically) pick a target and run it. The results will also be output to the Visual Studio IDE so I can just happily work in my environment. However I have yet to successfuly get NAntRunner working. The SourceForge project didn't a source release but the code is in CVS so I could see what's wrong and maybe fix it, but I don't want to do that. That's like renting a car and filling it with gas but it still doesn't do anything. It's not the end-consumers problem that the tool doesn't work (and others say they can't get it to work either). Obviously it somehow got working for the guy that wrote it as I can see screenshots of it in action. However, looking at the code reveals some really ugly assumptions like where cmd.exe is installed and where Visual Studio lives. I just want to use something that works!
It would be nice if I could just press a keystroke combination, see the output of my tests, run and deploy my build with NAnt all within the Visual Studio IDE. Is that too much to ask for? Sigh.