Visual Studio 2008 installs .NET 3.5 SDK v6.0A, which is what NAnt 0.86 expects to run against – however, the .NET 3.5 SDK that is available for download, via the "Windows 2008 and .NET 3.5 SDK", is v6.1. 

It’s a small difference, but that difference will cause NAnt 0.86 to not be able to target .NET 3.5 if you are using the downloadable .NET 3.5 SDK. When you try to run NAnt 0.86 and have it target .NET 3.5 with the downloaded .NET SDK, you will get an “Object reference” error from NAnt and the build will fail immediately.

Page Brooks has the details of how to fix NAnt to work against the v6.1 SDK. It is an easy fix, but it requires that every machine running NAnt have the v6.1 SDK installed (and if you want your devs to be able to run NAnt from their local machine, you’ll need all of the developers to install the updated version of the SDK).

End Result:

If you want to automate your VS2008 project builds with NAnt, you should probably have every developer on your team to install the new version of the SDK and have NAnt target that version.

If you have a batch file that takes two parameters with quotes around them, and you concatenate them together, you get too many quotes.  For example, if you have “test.bat” file with this code in it:

Echo %1%2

And you run it like this:

Test.bat “C:\” “Program Files\”

You end up with this result

“C:\””Program Files\”

Which is not a valid folder. I’m trying to get this result:

“C:\Program Files\”

The problem is, I have to put quotes around both parameters on the command line, in case there are spaces in the folder names. The solution to this is to use a ~ character in the variable, like this:

Echo %~1%~2

Running that command in the test.bat file produces this result:

C:\Program Files\

More info and parsing capabilities can be found here:

DOS - String Manipulation