NAntCollections Forum Rss Feed

NEW POST: Loading list/dictionary from xml files

jkohlhepp — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:34:21 GMT

Thanks for the suggested bhehe1. Glad to see someone found some use for this project. I added your suggestion as an issue.

http://www.codeplex.com/NAntCollections/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=7861

During the next release cycle (not sure when that will be - whenever more interest / requests pile up) we will make sure to add it.

~ Justin

NEW POST: Loading list/dictionary from xml files

bhehe1 — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 19:46:44 GMT

It would be very desirable to have an ability to load the list/dictionary from an external file. I'd have to imagine this is simple to implement though I haven't looked into it yet myself (I've only wrote 1 custom NAnt task myself and found it fairly simple).

NEW POST: Building and running UTs in VS.NET

jkohlhepp — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 01:19:54 GMT

I just changed the UTs so that they execute NAnt in-process, which is more performant and allows for setting breakpoints in the tasks and having them hit. The only downside with this is that some NAnt DLLs and the NAnt config file need to get copied to the build output file (i.e bin\Debug) in order for NAnt execution to work.

Obviously, we want to do this in a way where there are no absolute paths in the solution so that devs can have their own machine setups. So I made a NAnt build script called PostBuild.build which is executed by the VS.NET post build event. The build file can use the NAnt properties which are automatically set by NAnt to find the DLLs and config files and copy them.

The only issue I see with this is that NAnt\bin has to be in the user's %PATH% because the post build script does not specify a path to NAnt. Are there other issues I'm not forseeing?

Is there any better way to do this that have less moving parts?

~ Justin

NEW POST: Should clear actually delete the collection?

jkohlhepp — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 12:44:05 GMT

That sounds reasonable. I will add a work item for dict::is-empty and list::is-empty. They should both return true if the collection doesn't exist.

NEW POST: Should clear actually delete the collection?

JeffyW — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 03:52:36 GMT

nAnt itself currently doesn't unassign variables or "properties". Once a property is set, propery::exists will always return true. In addition, I feel that a build script that is concerned about these extra empty collections taking up resources might already be too unweildy.

I think that "dict::exists()" should return true if it has been created in the current build, regardless of it being emptied and we need either "dict::hasitems()" or "dict::isempty()" (or both). My question for you is should "dict::is_empty()" return true or false if the dict does not exist? I personally would, rather than test for the existance of a collection, test for the existance of items in a collection.

NEW POST: Should clear actually delete the collection?

jkohlhepp — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 01:18:26 GMT

Currently we have tasks like dict-clear and list-clear. These remove all items from the collection. After these tasks are run, should the collections dict::exists() and list::exists return true or false? If they should still return true, should we then have dict-delete and list-delete or are they unnecessary? Thoughts?