msbuildtasks - A collection of MSBuild Tasks (duh)

I'm starting to use MSBuild for some system-level stuff. I've been torn between that, NAnt, and Powershell for commonly executed admin tasks (backups, deploys, things like that).

The most tempting choice was PowerShell. It can do just about anything I'd need it to. That flexibility creates a problem, too: I don't want to have to maintain these things. If I use a full-featured language, then follow up maintainers will fall into two camps: the ones who add more complexity until it becomes too hard to maintain, and the ones who won't understand any of it at all.

I was a little jealous of NAnt, because it has matured very nicely. That has to be installed - never mind how easy - and needs to be justified.

Then I ran across msbuildtasks, from the same people who brought us Subversion. Lots of shiny stuff (I love it!) including tasks for IIS sites (I don't know if it does IIS7), a slew of build and deploy related tasks, SQL tasks, Registry tasks, and more.

Then I found the MSBuild Extension Pack, which is chock-full of shiny promise, too.

So, MSBuild is our winner (found a good tutorial, and yet another). It comes with .Net 2.0, which is installed anyway (okay, you have to copy those extensions, but that could be the first task :) ), it has the features I'm looking for, thanks to Tigris, and it is proven in the field. I'm sure it will suck, too, but at least I'll know how much and in what ways it sucks. If it doesn't work out, I'll look for something else.

Update: Despite the title of this article, I'm not even using the msbuildtasks package, yet. The MSBuild Extension Pack has a lot more goodies, and everything that I've needed so far.