Rules to Better Nuget - 4 Rules

Reasons for avoiding checking Nuget or Npm packages

1. Distributed version control systems, such as Git, include full copies of every version of every file within the repository. Binary files that are frequently updated lead to significant bloat and lengthens the time it takes to clone the repository.
2. When packages are included in the repository, developers are liable to add references directly to package contents on disk rather than referencing packages through NuGet, which can lead to hard-coded path names in the project.

Read more about how to omit NuGet packages in source control system

For better package management , may consider using the Package Management tool in TFS

Nuget is great for managing publicly available packages, but it’s also surprisingly easy to create and publish your own packages to your own nuget server for internal code reuse across multiple solutions.

The best NuGet packages are:

• MiniProfiler
• MVCMailer
• MvcDonutCaching
• MobileViewEngines - for MVC3 (built into MVC4)
• Glimpse (archived)

NuGet makes it easy to find and apply package updates – but this still must be performed manually.

Each package update should contain improvements but also involves a small amount of risk in the form of breaking changes or regressions.

Updating often can help mitigate this risk by ensuring that each individual update is smaller.

Recommended practice is to apply package updates at the start of a Sprint so that there is time to find and resolve issues introduced by the update.

Updating packages

Visual Studio GUI

In Visual Studio, the NuGet Package Manager will give you a count of how many outdated packages are present in your solution and allow you to update these packages.

CLI

If using the command line, you can use the following command to print the outdated packages in your solution:

dotnet list package --outdated

Outdated packages can then be updated by running the follow command, specifying the package and desired version:

dotnet add package <PACKAGE_NAME> -v <VERSION>

Package Manager Console

Visual Studio also provides a convenient command line tool for managing and updating packages using PowerShell, which allows for updating all packages easily. To access it, first open the Package Manager Console

Tools | NuGet Package Manager | Package Manager Console

Now enter the following command:

Update-Package

This will update all packages in every project of your solution in one command.

To check for updates, you can use the following command:

Get-Package -Updates

Specific packages can be updated by specifying the package name:

Update-Package <PACKAGE_NAME>