• Build plugins with Nant
• Build all plugins
• Writing nant script for your plugin
• No dll references
• With Dll reference

Build plugins with Nant

To make it easier to have people building plugins, I made a few Nant templates to build all plugins at once (provided they got an Nant script on their root folder).

The Nant scripts are in the vvvv svn repository (in the c# folder).

There are two nant build files samples in the _Samples folder too.

Build all plugins

To build all Plugins, you need to install nant first.

Nant Website

Then to make it easier on the command line, just add the following in your PATH environment variable:

PATH_TO_NANT/bin

Then open a command line, go to the vvvv c# folder, then type one of the following commands:

• nant help : Lists all commands
• nant build.core : Builds plugin interfaces and Utils (Debug)
• nant build.core.release : Builds plugin interfaces and Utils (Release)
• nant build.plugins : Builds core all plugins having nant script (Debug).
• nant build.plugins.release : Builds core all plugins having nant script (Release)
• nant clean : Deletes the build folder

Note: The build will create a "Build" folder in the c# folder from vvvv.
In this one, you will have a Plugins folder which contains the compiled dlls, and a Help folder (the script automaitcally copy any help patch as well :)

Writing nant script for your plugin

No dll references

If your plugin has no external references, you simply have to define a few properties and you're set (the templates takes care of all the rest).

Simple build

the root dir property must point to the c# base folder, so you can find the template.

No need to change the include file, as you defined root.dir before.

lib.name will be the assembly file name.

With Dll reference

If your plugin has external references, you need to add a variable to define those, and setup a little task to copy the reference in the build folder, nothing very complicated tho :)

File With dependency

First 3 properties are the same as before.

Then you need to override the references (Utils and PluginInterfaces are already defined for simple projects, but you need to readd them).
Just add one include line per reference dll your plugin has.

The post-build task will copy the references.
You just need to setup the fileset (here it's a folder as references should be kept in a separate folder, but you can use the include to use a specific file as well.

That's it, your plugin will automatically built when you run the build script from the main folder.

by vux