NuPack = win
If you’re a .NET developer, you probably heard that Microsoft announced NuPack this week. This will allow you to easily find open source projects and pull them directly into your project.
Here’s why I think this is really awesome — this is going to enable all kinds of open source development. Sure, it’ll be easy to pull in the big open source projects like NHibernate, but you already knew about NHibernate. I’m talking about the small, more specific open source projects that do more specific things like pagination of tables in web sites, OpenID authentication, manipulating Word documents, and such. There are lots of these sort of things in the Ruby world, and it makes development really easy because I can pull in all kinds of open source libraries from rubygems with one command from a command line.
Not only will it be easier for people to find open source, it makes developing open source cool. People out there will be trying to be the one who develops everyone’s favorite table pagination plugin for ASP.NET MVC, or a .NET wrapper for the jqGrid, and any number of other things.
I’m excited that Microsoft is putting their effort, developers, and money behind something like this and I hope that this will have a real and lasting effect on the .NET ecosystem.
I think it’s a good move. It’s certainly a step in the right direction. I know that some are annoyed at the announcement and feel that MS should have worked with the existing OSS package management tools, and I somewhat agree. But with Microsoft involved, it’s going to make OSS an option for a lot more people. And that is something the .NET community really needs.
Needed, certainly. Enough to be addequate to the problems of integrating multiple versions of fast growing open source and having a real uninstall of package option, given it touches real text files shared by all. Not a chance.
I applaud the effort but wish it was at least feature parity with other package managers before released. Or they could have shown less ego and just stood on the shoulders of giants.