Microsoft announces NuPack, a new package manager for open source .NET libraries | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft announces NuPack, a new package manager for open source .NET libraries

nupack.codeplex.com

45 pointssasvari13 comments

Awesome. This is what Codeplex should have had from the start.

I tried to get started building something similar a couple of years ago, but the VS extension API kinda defeated me.

I worked for Microsoft doing VS integration for XNA Game Studio. As someone who had access to both the VS source and several VS internals experts, I too was kinda defeated by the VS extension API.

Good to know it's not just me, then :-)

I was all enthused when John Lam did a demo of scripting Visual Studio with IronRuby (I don't think it was his work, he was just demoing it), so I sent him an email asking after the source, but it turned out not to be something they were going to release. Which was a shame. He did make it look awfully slick.

Doesn't VS2010 have a new extension API?

Kinda.

VS2010 has a new, WPF-based shell/editor. That brings along many new .NET-based integration points and mostly obsoletes the old editor APIs. They've also improved the plugin-loading architecture and several other things. However, do do any meaningful integration, you still need to code to the poorly documented COM APIs. The project system, for example, hasn't changed much at all since VS 6.

It's definitely not tied to VS. There is an extensible core that the VS clients are built on top of. I think the mono guys will have their own client.

@haacked said that they'll accept patches from the Mono guys for compatibility.

Yeah ... finally a new packaging system. I think it's always good to start a new packaging system as there are only about 5 gazillion ones out there. A least they have enough sources they can look at when they run in the same problems that everybody else has run into before. Writing a new packaging system seems to be the new Hello World.

Nupack isn't really a package management system as it stands... it's a very small part of one.

If you're interested in this space, you'd do well to check out @serialseb's OpenWrap: http://serialseb.blogspot.com/2010/07/intro-to-what-openwrap...

It's still in active development but, from demos I've seen if it, it looks very good. It seems to cover far more use cases than NuPack and has an elegant design.

This is just what .net needs... but the fact that it requires windows and visual studio just makes it impossible for me to use this.

I don't really follow Mono, but I've been seeing tweets tonight regarding support in NuPack for mono being worked on and changes being pushed to CodePlex throughout the day.

http://nupack.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets

it is open source, so I believe support could be put into mono etc.

"the fact that it requires windows and visual studio"

Isn't that what .NET is all about?

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