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Pipelining Legacy .NET Framework builds: Where to start?

Zach Detton 20 Reputation points
2025-05-12T16:25:39.1+00:00

I'm working with a dev team at my company to migrate their code from SVN to the company Gitlab and then create an automated pipeline. Their application is using .NET Framework 4.8, and Cruise Control for their current build pipeline along with an old tool called Nant. I come from a Linux background and haven't done any .NET development and I'm trying to figure out how to build it locally on a Windows VM so I can then automate the proess into a Gitlab pipeline. I've installed the .NET SDK and Frameworks, yet when I try to run msbuild or nbuild or any of the other build commands I keep seeing on other sites, powershell tells me the command doesn't exist. I know the devs are using an older version of Visual Studio (I think 2019) for their development. I figured there's something that can build the application without installing all of VS, like a standalone compiler.

Please guide me to the tools and such I'd need to install to get this to build. Ideally I'd like to learn enough to de-couple it from nant which hasn't been updated since 2012. I know there's nant2 but it hasn't been updated since 2019, and really I'd like to get it to where it's not relying on some 3rd party tool like it curently is.

C#
C#
An object-oriented and type-safe programming language that has its roots in the C family of languages and includes support for component-oriented programming.
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  1. Bruce (SqlWork.com) 76,256 Reputation points Moderator
    2025-05-12T18:12:29.1733333+00:00

    Cruise Control and Nant is are .net ports of the java Cruise Control ant utilities. They were popular before MS supported devops tools.

    as you building 4.* projects, your build server / container needs the visual studio 2022 build tools installed as the project files refer to them.

    https://aka.ms/vs/17/release/vs_BuildTools.exe

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/build-tools-container?view=vs-2022

    you will probably want to replace Nant with a scripting language to create build scripts with as there are several steps to a build. we wrote our pipeline tools in node using the msbuild package, but you can use any scripting language.

    unlike .net core, with 4.* projects you may need to run nuget manually to restore the packages. if you use the project style msbuild can restore, else you must use nuget.

    you will want to use command msbuild to build a solution:

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/msbuild/how-to-build-specific-targets-in-solutions-by-using-msbuild-exe?view=vs-2022

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