Damir Arh - NuGet 2 Essentials

I began my career in software development back in the days when dynamic web sites were created with Perl scripts (or lower-level CGI libraries for the adventurous) and desktop applications were created with C++ or Visual Basic 4. These programming environments, while enabling the development of richer and more powerful applications, required a lot from the developer. The most common shared functionality was provided by large platform SDKs and frameworks; however, the developer was still left to write common functions in each of his or her projects. The strategy for reusing these smaller bits of functionality was, at that time, copying and pasting.

As time progressed, development on the Microsoft platform grew more componentized with technologies such as COM, and later on .NET Framework assemblies. However, each of these improvements still had a few issues that ultimately prevented their widespread adoption as a general vehicle for component sharing.

There was no standard means for packing and installing components. Strategies ranged from making binaries available via file share or FTP to complete executables or MSIs.

There was no standard means of discovering and delivering components. Your success in reusing a component was a function of your search engine or personal network of colleagues.

Most component technologies modified the developer's machine state. This meant that two developers needed to have set up their machines the same way in order to work on the same project.

The result of these characteristics was that most component re-use was in the form of purchasing large component libraries from known vendors who had the ability to invest in creating the installation and delivery infrastructure as well to market their libraries to developers and software companies.

As you'll read in this book, the single greatest thing about NuGet is that it democratizes the process of sharing components. NuGet makes it easy for a developer or group of developers to create a shareable unit of functionality and publish it to a known location, making it easily discoverable by anyone who may then be able to benefit from that functionality.

I joined the NuGet team nearly two years ago, just before we released NuGet 1.6. At that point, NuGet was just introducing features such as package restore and support for semantic versioning prerelease tokens. Suffice to say, NuGet has evolved considerably since those days, with features such as automatic package restore, support for C++ projects, and enterprise features such as hierarchical configurationalong with a litany of additional features and fixes.

Given the pace of NuGet innovation, one of the things that makes this book valuable is its accessibility, regardless of the reader's familiarity with NuGet. If you are new to NuGet, you can start at the beginning to get an understanding of the big picture and then work through the more detailed aspects of package management with NuGet. If you are already familiar with NuGet and package management and want to learn more about a specific aspect of NuGet, the book is organized in such a manner as to make it easy to jump directly to the relevant section.

The second aspect of the book that I appreciate is its task-focused design. The authors provide enough contexts to be helpful, but then quickly move into walking the reader through actually using NuGet in the way that they described. Given that all of us are trying to get more results from our already time-constrained lives, I greatly appreciate this "learn by doing" approach. This approach is also quite consistent with the spirit of NuGet, which is to remove as much friction as possible when it comes to building great software projects.

My hope is that after reading this book, you'll have a better sense of how to use NuGet to improve the development workflows in your own projectsmaybe in ways that you had not previously thought about. I also hope that for many of you, this book piques your interest in the NuGet open source project and serves as a starting point for your deeper involvement as a contributor to the future of NuGet.

Howard Dierking

Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation