Who Wants Cake?!

I’ve been learning and trying out new build systems in .NET recently and decided to give Cake a sample. (See what I did there?)

First Impressions

Right away I liked how the scripts look and feel. This is quite important to me and one of the reasons I dislike scripting things in Powershell. Powershell is more difficult for me to read and understand than I would like. I believe it’s largely due to the common coding styles, but that’s my problem.

Here’s a sample script:

var target = Argument("target", "Default");
var configuration = Argument("configuration", "Release");
var buildDir = Directory("./src/Example/bin") + Directory(configuration);

Task("Clean")
  .Does(() => {
    CleanDirectory(buildDir);
});

Task("Restore-NuGet-Packages")
  .IsDependentOn("Clean")
  .Does(() => {
    NuGetRestore("./src/Example.sln");
});

Task("Build")
  .IsDependentOn("Restore-NuGet-Packages")
  .Does(() => {
    MSBuild("./src/Example.sln", settings =>
      settings.SetConfiguration(configuration));
});

Task("Default")
  .IsDependentOn("Build");

RunTarget(target);

To me (and possibly because I write C# nearly every day) this is very readable and nice to look at.

Tools

There are loads of tools out of the box, but a couple more that I needed. I was able to get Fixie into the v0.5.0 release, so that was nice. The other is RoundhousE, which should be coming soon!

Contributing

Many Kudos to Patrik for maintaining a very clean and intuitive codebase! Everything is well thought out, in the right place, and easy to understand and follow. If you want to fix a bug or add a feature to this project, it won’t be hard. In fact, it will probably be a pleasure! Additionally, the issues on GitHub are a great place to ask questions, request features, or submit bugs. You’ll likely get a response from Patrik or somebody else the same day; as a maintainer of other open source projects, I wish I was that good.

All of these reasons make this a very nice project to work on if you’re looking to get more into open source. There are even some Up For Grabs Cake issues you could work on today!