Psake VS NAnt2

You may use other tools too: psake, make, cake, fake or any other *ake you are familiar with. I look at them as a tools that make build tasks behind simple commands and help me answer: How did I run that code again?

I use the psake PowerShell module to "build" my PowerShell modules. My psakefile.ps1 contains the logic needed to update the manifest with an incremented version, any new function/cmdlet names, and so on. Then it copies everything from .\src\ to .\output\modulename\version. All I do is call Invoke-psake build or Invoke-psake test, and this works great as-is for "pure powershell modules".

I've used psake (powershell+make) https://github.com/psake/psake - the main thing that attracted me to this was that it wasn't an XML based system (Nant/MSbuild), and it handled task prerequisites very nicely. While some devs find powershell a bit of a pain to learn, they generally become useful very quickly, and I think it's useful to be able to do some level of powershelling anyway.

GitHub - psake/psake: A build automation tool written in PowerShell

I've been working on NAnt2 - a fork of the awesome NAnt project. Since it might look both projects have stalled, it's not true for NAnt2 - ideas and things to do still pop up thus there are 101 issues currently on its board, besides bringing it to year 2021.

NAnt is a capable system (in some ways better than MSBuild) and it's still sort of alive in the form of NAnt2 but yes, very old school.