Pro NuGet will give you a solid, practical, understanding of both how to keep your software dependencies under control and what best-practices have been developed within the NuGet community to ensure long-term reliability. Whether you’re working entirely with .NET assemblies or also using CSS, HTML and JavaScript files within your applications this book will show you how to manage their requirements smoothly and reliably.

As sponsors of the NuGet project Microsoft have led the way in showing how NuGet can be used to great effect; showing how it is now virtually indispensable to anyone working with MVC and the .NET Framework.

So don’t delay! Learn how to use NuGet effectively today and thank yourself for the time and stress that this powerful free extension will save you.

NuGet is an open-source Visual Studio extension that makes it easy to manage libraries, components and configuration files from within your Visual Studio project. As every developer knows, the more complex your application becomes the more chance there is of a dependency conflict arising within the resources upon which you depend. This situation - known as “dependency hell” - used to be an arduous task to unravel and rectify. NuGet changes this situation completely saving you untold time and stress.

What you’ll learn

• Understanding how NuGet fits into the big picture of your software development process to save you time and money.
• How to keep your team working when your project depends on an external resource (such as a web service or cloud) which suddenly becomes unavailable.
• Whether or not to auto-update NuGet packages within a continuous integration process for maximum reliability and speed.
• How to combine NuGet with PowerShell to create your own Cmdlets and extend the base toolset in an extremely powerful manner.
• Evaluate the pros-and-cons of hosting your own NuGet repository.
• How to incorporate NuGet seamlessly within your continuous integration process.
• Much much more!

Who this book is for

This book is perfect for anyone working with Visual Studio and .NET who needs to manage application dependencies of any kind. You should have a basic working knowledge of Visual Studio but all NuGet and PowerShell based techniques will be introduced from first principals.

Table of Contents

1. Getting Started
2. Consuming and Managing Packages in a Solution
3. Creating Packages
4. Publishing Packages
5. Hosting Your Own NuGet Server 
6. Continuous Package Integration
7. Automated Delivery
8. NuGet Recipes  
9. Extending NuGet 
10. NuGet as a Protocol
11. Appendix A: Package Manifest
12. Appendix B: NuGet Command Line Reference
13. Appendix C: NuGet Package Manager Console PowerShell Reference
14. Appendix D: NuGet Configuration File Reference