Integrating .NET projects with Gradle

Recently I have created Gradle build scripts for several .NET projects, bot C# and VB.NET projects. Projects for the .NET platform are usually built with MSBuild, which is part of the .NET Framework distribution and itself a full-blown build automation tool: you can define build targets, their dependencies and execute tasks to reach the build targets. I have written about the basics of MSBuild in a previous blog post.

The .NET projects I was working on were using MSBuild targets for the various build stages as well. Not only for building and testing, but also for the release and deployment scripts. These scripts were called from our Jenkins CI with the MSBuild Jenkins Plugin.

Gradle plugins

However, I wasn’t very happy with MSBuild’s clunky Ant-like XML based syntax, and for most of our other projects we are using Gradle nowadays. So I tried Gradle for a new .NET project. I am using the Gradle MSBuild and Gradle NUnit plugins. Of course, the MSBuild Gradle plugin is calling MSBuild, so I don’t get rid of MSBuild completely, because Visual Studio’s .csproj and .vbproj project files are essentially MSBuild scripts, and I don’t want to get rid of them. So there is one Gradle task which to calls MSBuild, but everything else beyond the act of compilation is automated with regular Gradle tasks, like copying files, zipping release artifacts etc.

Basic usage of the MSBuild plugin looks like this:

plugins {
  id "com.ullink.msbuild" version "2.18"
}

msbuild {
  // either a solution file
  solutionFile = 'DemoSolution.sln'
  // or a project file (.csproj or .vbproj)
  projectFile = file('src/DemoSoProject.csproj')

  targets = ['Clean', 'Rebuild']

  destinationDir = 'build/msbuild/bin'
}

The plugin offers lots of additional options, be sure to check out the documentation on Github. If you want to give the MSBuild step its own task name, which is currently not directly mentioned on the Github page, use the task type Msbuild from the package com.ullink:

import com.ullink.Msbuild

// ...

task buildSolution(type: 'Msbuild', dependsOn: '...') {
  // ...
}

Since the .NET projects I’m working on use NUnit for unit testing, I’m using the NUnit Gradle plugin by the same creator as well. Again, please consult the documentation on the Github page for all available options. What I found necessary was setting the nunitHome option, because I don’t want the plugin to download a NUnit release from the internet, but use the one that is included with our project. Also, if you want a task with its own name or multiple testing tasks, use the NUnit task type in the package com.ullink.gradle.nunit:

import com.ullink.gradle.nunit.NUnit

// ...

task test(type: 'NUnit', dependsOn: 'buildSolution') {
  nunitVersion = '3.8.0'
  nunitHome = "${project.projectDir}/packages/NUnit.ConsoleRunner.3.8.0/tools"
  testAssemblies = ["${project.projectDir}/MyProject.Tests/bin/Release/MyProject.Tests.dll"]
}
test.dependsOn.remove(msbuild)

With Gradle I am now able to share common build tasks, for example for our release process, with our other non .NET projects, which use Gradle as well.