Month / May 2011

by Ricardo Sanchez

NuGet, The Package Management System for the .Net Platform

Update – 2019

NuGet is now part of Visual Studio and some of the information described here does not apply anymore.

NuGet is a package management system for the .NET platform, it is supposed to simplify the process of incorporating third-party libraries into a .NET project during development. Basically, it is a great way to add (and update) oopen-sourcelibraries and the like to your .NET project. The first version of NuGet was released in October 2010 and it was originally named NuPack.

How to get it

NuGet can be installed from here or from Visual Studio’s Extension Manager located under the Tools menu.

The awesomeness of it

Before NuGet, the way we incorporated third-party libraries into our projects was by doing the following:

  1. Download third-party library (and any dependencies) from the web.
  2. Unpack them (as many of them come in compressed files) to a folder in our project, I usually create (or created) a folder labeled “lib” and placed all the third-party libraries there.
  3. Import to the .NET project.
  4. Make any necessary changes to the config file when needed.
Too much work right? With NuGet, you basically open your project in Visual Studio and type a command in the new Package Manager Console. For example, if you wanted to add NUnit to your project, you’ll type the following command:
Install-Package NUnit

Continue reading →

by Ricardo Sanchez

MIX11 – A tribute to Microsoft’s Web Stack of Love!

A few weeks ago I attended MIX11 in Las Vegas. MIX is an annual event where Microsoft showcase their new web technologies. This year it was all about new versions of existing products, such as Windows Phone 7, Entity Framework, Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, IIS, etc… Below is a summary of what was shared on both keynotes:

  • Mango: code name for coming version of Windows Phone 7 (WP7).
  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools update
  • Entity Framework 4.1
  • Silverlight 5 Beta
  • NuGet
  • IIS Express
  • SQL Compact Edition 4
  • Internet Explorer 10 Preview
There were many sessions available, some of them really good and some others were not. One thing that I did appreciate was the endless supply of coffee, water and other drinks. Snacks were available as well between breakfast and lunch which were also provided by Microsoft.
All sessions are now available online as well as both keynotes, check them out!
As a software developer, the most interesting for me was the ASP.NET MVC 3 tools update, EF 4.1. Continue reading →