In my drive to sort out my development processes there are a few things I want to do. Top of my list is proper automated testing and creating automatic documentation.

Doing these steps every time I compile my site (or application) will add a lot more steps, so I thought it would be better to learn how to automate the build process first.

I'd heard that NAnt was the tool I should be using, but I found it a little bit overwhelming.

NAnt is a program that follows a list of instructions in an XML file called a build file. These instructions are used to do a series of tasks like the following:

• Compile a site's ASP.NET code behind files
• Compile some unit tests
• Copy some files
• Run the unit tests
• Run a program to create documents

It took me a while to get my head round it, but I finally got a simple build file working. I found Jean-Paul Boodhoo's NAnt starter series very helpful.

Next I'm going to get the testing working and then automate it using NAnt.