Is there a Maven alternative or port for the .NET world?

Byldan is a port of Maven, but it isn't a 100% analog to the tool. Shane Isbell has been working on this project for a while, you can read more about it here.

Even though the answer that references NMaven has some sort of green checkbox next to it, it is incorrect: there is nothing called Apache NMaven as the project never made it out of the ASF incubator. The trunk continues to live on as NMaven at Codeplex. NMaven is written in Java and Byldan is written in C#. Most people looking for something like Maven for the .NET platform are not going to want to deal with a tool writen in Java. Byldan, IMO, is the most appropriate tool as it is written in C#.

It seems that while all appear to be lacking NPanday is the most mature and actively developed Maven dependency management for .NET and if I had to bet on one it would be that one. The way I see it ideally any .NET solution would be mostly compatible with Maven like Byldan so it could use the same maven repositories such as Maven central.

My problem with Byldan which initially looked more promising than NPanday is that it hasn't been actively developed since 2008, NPanday has a release as of Sep 8th, version 1.2.1 to Byldan's version 0.6 from 2008.

Update:

It seems that NuGet does indeed perform some of the Maven type functions in the .NET world. It also appears that Microsoft is implicitly endorsing NuGet if not explicitly doing so. In full disclosure I don't have experience using NuGet but based on the November 2011 MSDN Magazine article here it looks very promising. NuGet also has full Visual Studio 2010 integration and supports Windows Phone, Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation.

NuGet (formerly called NuPack) addresses some of the features of Maven. You can read about it at Phil Haack, Scott Hanselman and, of course, Scott Guthrie.

NMaven has been the first/official effort to provide Apache Maven for .NET; the project failed to clear the high bar of requirements for an official Apache project and was retired from the Apache Incubator in November 2008. There have been several efforts to fork and survive the project, but only one of them (NPanday) managed to do so and has been able to rejoin the Apache Incubator in August 2010. Sadly also the NPanday project was retired in January 2015 because it is lacking active committers.

• Active projects (as of July 2015)

  • none
    
    

• Inactive projects (as of July 2015)

  • NMaven: Maven plugins that do .NET Builds.

  • Byldan: A .NET version of Maven. Written in C#.

  • NPanday: a project to integrate Apache Maven into .NET development environments.