Many developers I run into have little idea how many Open Source projects are out there that are useful for non-Open Source products developed with Visual Studio.NET.  I thought what I should do is post a tool to automatically download the tools and projects that I use or have mentioned in my book.  This is useful to people new to the Open Source community to see all the available code as well as people who want to keep current automatically.  I thought well I’ll need a task to get things via http, ftp, cvs and subversion.  It should be in a config file XML format and then I realized that NAnt already provided all of this.  By default the build file will only download .NET related Open Source.  But there is another task in the build file for other Open Source projects of interest.  Here it is.

To use it simply type nant at a command prompt in the directory that you unzip the package to.  Please send me back any improvements.

Have fun and enjoy learning from Open Source.