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Package Management with NuGet

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Package Management Systems

3:38 with Jeremy McLain

We discuss what package management systems are and how they're helpful.

For more information on how to install and use Visual Studio, see the Introduction to Visual Studio workshop.

Why is it called NuGet?

Sometime in early to mid 2010, a few .NET developers envied the awesomeness of Ruby’s Gem package management system so they decided to make their own. By August of 2010 they had a working package management system. They changed the name to Nubular because because it was, well, tubular dude. And, of course, it just had to start with an N because it was meant for .NET. Back then, the way to install Nubular was to first install Ruby and then use Gem to install Nubular.

At the same time, Microsoft was working on their own package management system for .NET. They called it NPack. Again with the names that start with N! They heard about Nubular and decided to open source NPack and requested the help of Nubular developers. They renamed the project to NuPack. This was one of the first times Microsoft worked in earnest with the open source community and it turned out smashingly well!

In late October of 2010 it was ready to be released as a Visual Studio extension. Before releasing it, the community decided to rename it NuGet because there was already a piece of software out there called NuPack.

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    [MUSIC] 0:00
    Hello, I'm Jeremy, today we'll be learning about NuGet. 0:04
    No I don't mean the soft yummy goodness inside of a Snickers bar, 0:09
    NuGet is a package management system for .NET projects. 0:13
    It's one of the most used Visual Studio extensions. 0:16
    It's so popular in fact that it now comes pre-installed with Visual Studio. 0:20
    It's been around since late 2010 and it was born from a collaboration between 0:25
    developers of Microsoft and folks in the open source community. 0:30
    If you wanna earn more about its history and how it can be called NuGet 0:35
    you might want to check out the teacher's notes of this workshop. 0:39
    Let's start by talking about what a package management system is, 0:42
    in order to get a good idea of what NuGet is capable of. 0:46
    Almost all software has dependencies. 0:50
    This is code that you probably didn't write yourself but 0:52
    you want to use in your own application. 0:55
    In fact, nowadays in order to write a software application, we only need to 0:57
    write a small percentage of the total code the applications need to run. 1:01
    Our code depends on other code that we probably didn't write ourselves. 1:07
    In the case of C#, this code is typically compiled and 1:11
    packaged together as a library. 1:14
    .Net libraries are called assemblies. 1:16
    But you'll notice that I use the terms, library and 1:19
    assembly interchangeably to refer to .NET assemblies. 1:22
    The libraries our applications need may already be part of 1:25
    the operating system the application runs on, or 1:29
    they may be part of another application that is already installed on the computer. 1:31
    .NET, for example, 1:36
    is a piece of software that comes pre-installed on Windows computers. 1:37
    It contains many libraries that are used by .NET applications. 1:42
    .NET in turn, depends on libraries that are part of the Windows operating system. 1:46
    We can get other libraries that we might want to use our applications, 1:51
    by downloading them from the Internet. 1:55
    This is where package management system comes in. 1:57
    People and organizations that want to make their code available for 2:01
    others to use can put one or 2:05
    more libraries into a package and upload it to a central repository of packages. 2:07
    When we want to use their libraries, 2:13
    we only need to go to the central repository and download them. 2:15
    A Package Management System is responsible for managing all of these packages and 2:19
    making it easy for developers to both upload and download packages. 2:24
    We can think of it as an App Store for code where everything is free. 2:29
    Now you may have noticed that there are many different package management systems 2:34
    out there, there's typically a main one for each programming language. 2:37
    So if you're coming to .Net from another programming language, 2:41
    you may already be familiar with one or more package managers. 2:45
    For example, Java has Gradle. 2:48
    Ruby has gems, Python has Pip, JavaScript has NPM and 2:51
    Bower, PHP has Composer, and the list goes on and on. 2:56
    The package management system for .NET is Nuget. 2:59
    When I say .NET, I mean any packages that are meant to run using the .NET framework. 3:04
    .NET assemblies can be compiled from C# or 3:09
    any .NET programming language such as J# or Visual Basic. 3:12
    NuGet packages typically only contain the assembly files and 3:16
    not the actual source code files. 3:20
    Now let's open Visual Studio and see what NuGet can do. 3:23
    For this workshop, you'll want to have Visual Studio 2015 or later installed. 3:26
    If you don't already have it installed, check the teacher's notes for 3:31
    a workshop on how to install Visual Studio. 3:35

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