I know that NANT is of great benefit to an automated or continuous build porcess, but until recently, I have to admit that I had *no clue* that it was so much faster than Visual Studio when it came to compiling a behemoth solution!!

During the initial EDMUG meeting, Jean-Paul Boodhoo brought up NANT when talking about continuous builds.  My current gig is nowhere near ready to start having continuous builds, but one thing JP mentioned piqued my curiosity; he said there was a huge difference in speed between using NANT for compilation vs. VS.NET for compilation (espcially VS 2005, which is a bit of a pig).

I've always known of NANT's advantages re: automation but I'd actually never considered just using it for my own test development builds.  To give some background, we have several solution files (all project referenced - I know, I know) that have over 85 projects (some far greater than that, even).  Not only is this a bear to load in VS2003, but launching a full solution compile in the IDE takes something like 10-15 minutes.  This, of course, means that compiling the solution, changing some code, and recompiling can take almost half an hour.  Trust me, it's not pretty.

Armed with a strong desire for improving this process (and the Igloo Coder's copy of "Expert .NET Delivery Using NANT and CruiseControl.NET"), I started delving into NANT to try and cobble together a "developer" build file.  It took several tries to get a proper solution build going, but once I was successful...holy cow!

My benchmark time differences:

VS 2003 full compile of solution: 10 minutes
NANT full compile of solution: 51 *seconds*

In the past, I have often touted NANT's value at companies strictly from the automated/continuous build process point of view.  However, now I have some additional ammunition - this thing is *so* much faster than a normal VS compile that it's possible to save your developers a significant amount of time on large projects, simply by making them a development build file to compile their solutions!