NAnt

NAnt serves itself as a great war of structuring and building .NET framework and Mono runtime environments, having quite a few GUIs available to choose from and a huge selection of ready tools, waiting to be used. Ultimately NAnt should be used by users needing an Ant alternating, or simply those seeking just a good base for .NET building, without a long installation process or some complex introduction needed for proper programming and structuring to take place.

The great thing is that it is also free and cross-platform, something which ensures you can work from anywhere and anytime you may find yourself working on this great piece of software. Executing shell command isn't the primary goal of the application but it's still possible via the task, allowing for easy and fast execution of anything you might need to run or test on your system. Other than all of that anything that might apply to the Ant program should probably fit right in with the familiar NAnt, though the name might be a little misguiding as it is literally NotAnt.     

Features:

NAnt is something of an Ant modification, working of syntax highlighting text editing, task classes, target tree executions, and others, while also being open-source and free

• Lots of GUI versions, varying for different purposes and eventual uses of the same program
• Is cross-platform, meaning full portability and use across all platforms
• Targets, outputs, error pin-pointing, and all the other features you might find in other solutions are also present
• Various exporting and importing formats, those that are applicable to the .NET format, of course
• Great option for C# developers, having a solid amount of XML-based functions, scripting, too, Unit Testing, etc. All are great even if taken by themselves as standalone, and perfected then used in combination with other solutions! 

If you bring it down to a short summary it would be right to settle on NAnt being a pretty good option for programmers knowledgeable in the sphere of creating working .NET builds, being both a great tool for constructing, zipping/archiving, backing up, and tracking the mentioned, as well as deploying those automated builds on external servers, and many other things that you might need from a software similar to this one.