Last week, I released NMaven 0.17 on its new project site at CodePlex. Features for this release include compiling C# projects, signing assemblies, and multiple archetype support.

I originally started NMaven on Sourceforge, and after a number of releases, moved it into Apache incubation. Over the last two years, we had trouble gaining traction at Apache. So we decided to shut the project down and move it to CodePlex to give it some fresh air.

The next critical feature for NMaven is getting support for .NET 3.0 using Maven toolchains. Maven 3.x provides a cleaner architecture for supporting of multiple languages, like C# and VB.NET. All of this is much easier to do than it was when NMaven started. I’ve also got some more features in the works dealing with pom to Visual Studio project conversions, which you will be able to use after the release of Maven 3.0-alpha1, with its new project builder.

Maven 3.0 does all project model processing on a canonical data format, consisting of nearly 500 property values. Using a canonical data format makes it easy to do bidirectional transforms between the Maven pom and other model types.

To transform from an XML format to the property format, you can take any stream containing data in XML and pass it the static method ModelMarshaller.marshallXmlToModelProperties. In the case of the Visual Studio’s C# project file, it would look something like: Continue reading →