NPanday 1.2 released – Apache Maven for .NET

The NPanday team finally released NPanday 1.2, coming with quite a few fixes and also some features. In total there were 55 issues fixed. You can find the release notes here. The download is found at CodePlex.

If you haven’t heard of NPanday yet: It brings Apache Maven to the .NET world. In addition to numerous maven plugins for various .NET-related build tasks it comes with a Visual Studio Addin as well.

Major Improvements

• Compatible with Maven 3
• MSI-based installer for the Visual Studio AddIn
• Improved Mono-compatibility
• Improved Documentation
• Many bug fixes
• Improved type names… dotnet-library instead of library, e.g. (NPanday – Project Types)

Hidden Features

We have also implemented two almost undocumented features. We are not yet sure about how those will evolve, that’s why we don’t make noise here…

1. There is now a custom-lifecycle-plugin that registers the NPanday Types, but only binds the install and the deploy phases. You can then configure plugin executions as you need them in the project pom.

<plugin>
  <groupId>npanday.plugin</groupId>
  <artifactId>custom-lifecycle-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>1.2</version>
  <extensions>true</extensions>
</plugin>

2. The new type dotnet-archive allows you to package and reference dotnet libraries along with their satellite assemblies, debug symbols or other necessary files. When resolving a dotnet-archive dependency you can use unpack-dependencies to get the files, and for packaging them up, you want to use the Maven Assembly Plugin. For future releases we tend to implement native support for dotnet-archive.

Planned for next releases

• Support for .NET 4
• Code Coverage with NCover
• Localized Satellite Assemblies
• Update everything to the new types (dotnet-*)
• …

You may want to read Brett Porters’s post as well: NPanday 1.2 Released – .NET integration for Apache Maven