NAnt and Setup Projects (*.vdproj)

If you're like me, you're lazy. And last night, while on my couch watching the Olympics, I attempted to do a simple thing - compile a solution containing a setup project (.vdproj) from NAnt. After all, when you're distributing a Windows Forms application to a non-technical audience, it's natural to want an installer to bootstrap to the .NET framework, copy the application to the program files directory, and create an icon on the desktop and start menu. To enhance efficiency through automation, it's also natural to want to build the software on a build server instead of manually on a developer workstation. Let's just say it took longer than a few heats of the 100m butterfly to complete this simple task. Hopefully I can decrease that learning curve for you, my fellow developer.

My first thought was, "I'll use msbuild to compile the solution". It's completely logical, but unfortunately impossible. vdproj files can only be compiled by Visual Studio. After about an hour of scouring the Internet in denial and throwing up in my bathroom, I accepted this *enormous* limitation. Apparently this issue has been known by Microsoft since at least 2004, but they haven't had time to address it. Most likely this time was instead spent pursuing the Microsoft dream. By the way, in the Microsoft dream a non-technical website administrator drags their entire SQL Server database onto the ASP.NET "design surface" and selects the publish option from the build menu.

The next problem that arises is: how do I call Visual Studio from NAnt? What executable and command-line arguments do I use? How do I dynamically determine where Visual Studio is installed? Below is some NAnt code that answers these questions:

<readregistry
property="ide.dir"
key="SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\InstallDir"
hive="LocalMachine" />

<echo message="IDE Directory is ${ide.dir}" />

<exec
program="devenv.exe"
workingdir="."
basedir="${ide.dir}"
commandline="src\XYZ.sln /Clean"/>

<exec
program="devenv.exe"
workingdir="."
basedir="${ide.dir}"
commandline="src\XYZ.sln /Rebuild Release"/>

There are a couple of ways of skinning this cat, but reading the Visual Studio 2008 path out of the registry actually turns out to be the simplest solution. I hope this helps somebody else out some day.