Microsoft Ships Free Package Manager for Open Source Libraries: NuGet

A new initiative from Microsoft is set up to streamline the integration of open source libraries within .NET projects as much as possible.

The Redmond company even took the first step in the right direction with the introduction of NuGet.

Essentially, with NuGet, the software giant is providing a free, open source, package manager designed to simplify the development work required in order to leverage open source libraries in .NET framework projects.

Delivered as a Visual Studio extension, NuGet is still a young project that is bound to grow in the future, but already a viable solution to install and update open source libraries and tools in VS.

“NuGet enables developers who maintain open source projects (for example, .NET projects like Moq, NHibernate, Ninject, StructureMap, NUnit, Windsor, Raven, Elmah, etc) to package up their libraries and register them with an online gallery/catalog that is searchable.

“The client-side NuGet tools – which include full Visual Studio integration – make it trivial for any .NET developer who wants to use one of these libraries to easily find and install it within the project they are working on,” revealed Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Platform.

Guthrie emphasized that NuGet is already designed to play nice with a variety of.NET project types such as ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, WinForms, Silverlight, and Class Libraries.

“NuGet handles dependency management between libraries (for example: library1 depends on library2). It also makes it easy to update (and optionally remove) libraries from your projects later. It supports updating web.config files (if a package needs configuration settings).

“It also allows packages to add PowerShell scripts to a project (for example: scaffold commands). Importantly, NuGet is transparent and clean – and does not install anything at the system level. Instead it is focused on making it easy to manage libraries you use with your projects,” he added.

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.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.