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Many people have discovered that Rake is a lean, mean, build assisting machine. Even better, some .NET developers enjoying it too. It's even been praised by some of the industry's best.

Getting started with Rake and .NET is actually childs play.

• Download the Ruby for windows one click installer.
• Install it

Great, you've now got everything you need installed on your machine and are ready to start using Rake. All that's left to do now is create a simple Rakefile and run it.

• Open any .NET solution you've been working on recently in Visual Studio.
• Add a solution item called Rakefile.rb (type is text file)
• Paste in the following and save

    task :default => :welcome

    task :welcome do
        sh "echo Rake is up and running. Hurrah!"
    end

• Open a command prompt (Start->Run->Cmd)
• Type: cd c:\Code\MySolutionFolder (obviously put your own path in)
• Type: rake
• Done!

If you see this, you've got a working installation of Rake.

echo Rake is up and running. Hurrah!
Rake is up and running. Hurrah!

If you want to now know how to get the most from Rake with .NET, go and see how other .NET developers are using Rake.