I would also like to know how the GAC works when i am using a standalone installer ?
Will it override my existing assembly int the project ?
if i have the express edition vs 2010 which does not have nuget ,how do i best make use of these packages without breaking my existing stuff?
You're asking several different questions here.
Generally, the GAC always overrides the bin folder for a given version of an assembly. However, if the bin assembly has a different version, and your config file points to that version, it will use that instead of the GAC.
With VS Express that doesn't have the NuGet VSIX, using NuGet is definitely a bit harder. You need to get the NuGet command line tool, and run the install command to download packages, which you can then manually reference in your projects.
Related
In the project I've been using some custom NuGet sources. Apparently some of them are no longer available but I do have the newer (and only newer) versions of the packages on the other (still working) server. Is there a way to restore the packages directly to the newest versions without manually replacing all the references in the .csproj and packages.config files?
I've tried running Updade-Package -Reinstall but I only get the following error message:
Some NuGet packages are missing from the solution. The packages need to be restored in order to build the dependency graph. Restore the packages before performing any operations.
If some packages you use (and still want to use) are no longer available, I suggest you to make a backup of them.
Find the Nuget cache on your server. On Windows this is located at
%userprofile%.nuget\packages
Spot the packages (and version) you want to backup and copy the .nupkg files in their respective folders.
Then you have two choices:
Create a private Nuget feed
Create a local Nuget feed on your development machine
The 1st option has the advantage to be a single source that can be used on any machine you want (development machine, build server...etc) but you will have more set-up, especially for the authentication/authorization (because it's a private feed)
For the 2nd option: Simply create a C:/Nuget folder and put any .nupkg you want.
Then in Visual Studio go to:
Tools -> Nuget Package Manager -> Package Manager Settings -> Package Sources
Click on the green + button to add a new source, simply give it the name Local and browse to your C:/Nuget to set the source.
From now on when you want to restore your Nuget packages, Visual Studio will first look into the nuget.org feed and if it doesn't find the referenced packages, will then look into your Local feed and cache the installed package to the %userprofile%.nuget\packages of your machine.
I hope that answer to your question, I was not quite sure about what you asked and your knowledge about Nuget.
UPDATE:
I think I understand your question better now.
First of all, I think your misunderstand the Update-Package -Reinstall command. It will reinstall the packages with the SAME version as already referenced but simply reinstalling them. It's a useful command for example when you change the target framework of your project. Then you can reinstall the same versions of the packages and they will retarget this .NET Framework version.
So if a nuget restore isn't working then Update-Package -Reinstall will obviously fail too.
With Nuget, when something isn't working, you shouldn't insist but instead, find the tweak that will make it working again. I can't count how many times I went to the different caches to delete some cached packages.
I think you should try to use nuget restore and see what packages are causing issues, then uninstall these packages (this will just remove the reference from the .csproj and packages.config if they aren't installed in the project yet), then you can finally install the newest version of these packages.
I'm trying to use nuget.exe outside of Visual Studio as part of our build infrastructure. The idea is that the various build tools are fetched by a bootstrapper script that initializes a working copy. The bootstrapper does this by using a file that specifies the required tools and their version.
Broken approach 1 - use manually edited packages.config
At first, it seemed like a good idea to keep a manually edited packages.config file and use nuget restore to install them during bootstrapping. However, this does not work for tools that have dependencies, unless I list every single dependency in the packages.config as well, a much to arduous approach to be feasible, because I found no easy way to recursively find all dependencies of a package.
See also using nuget.exe commandline to install dependency .
Broken approach 2 - use nuget install to update packages.config
The second idea was then to use nuget install to install the packages, and let that command update the packages.config, very similar to the Install-Package cmdlet in the package manager console. But, surprisingly, nuget install does not support this! It either takes a packages.config or a package ID as parameter, but I found no way to update the packages.config with the new package and its dependencies.
This problem can also be found in another (two year old) SO question, see nuget.exe install not updating packages.config (or .csproj)?.
Is there a working (and non-hacky) approach at all?
This must be a problem that many people face when using nuget outside of VS, so what is the best approach in that case?
Of course, I could just parse the packages.config and emit a nuget install for each package, but I really don't want to re-invent the dependency management part of nuget, this is what I'm using nuget for in the first place. So I'm left with the feeling that either an -WithDependencies switch on nuget restore or an -UpdatePackagesConfig switch on nuget install is missing...
Note that there are other SO questions regarding the broken approaches described above. What I'd like to know it what the best approach is to solve the root problem, i.e. manage packages with dependencies outside of VS.
nuget install does not currently make changes to the project file.
nuget install can be used to either restore the NuGet packages listed in a packages.config file or download and extract them.
If you do not need the project being modified then your solution of reading the packages in the packages.config file and calling nuget install seems like a reasonable approach.
If you need the project to be modified then you could look at one of the following:
Ripple - a command line tool that adds extra features to NuGet. It has a ripple install command line which is similar to nuget install but it also updates the project file. It has a lot of other features for supporting build servers so this might be a good fit.
NuGet packages outside of Visual Studio with SharpDevelop - this was an experiment I put together to see whether full NuGet support could be achieved, including PowerShell scripts, from the command line without using Visual Studio. It uses PowerShell and quite a bit of SharpDevelop.
Customise NuGet.exe to do what you need. nuget update, for example, does modify the project file, at least for file references, but will not run PowerShell scripts. So you could take the NuGet.exe source code and extend it.
Of the above only 3) would give you exactly what you need. The other two would require a bit of work to read the packages from the packages.config file or some other list and then install them.
See my answer to Why does the nuget command line tool not follow dependencies?
nuget install My.Package.Id will follow dependencies. However, if you want to install multiple packages, you will need to create a batch file with a separate nuget install command for each package. These are top-level packages. You don't need to "install" the dependencies, as they will get downloaded automatically.
If you ultimately want a packages.config file, I imagine you can generate one by enumerating all the packages that were downloaded. However, you would have to take care not to include multiple versions of the same package.
I believe that how nuget 3 works with project.json files may do what you are looking for. Essentially my understanding is that the unit of dependency becomes the package and not necessarily individual assemblies. From what I recall, the idea is the have only one place to manage these types of package references which the project (IDE/Editor), package manager, and other command line tools can use.
What I don't understand and feel somewhat frustrated about is that it appears that the project.json concept is being canceled. I don't know if plans are to reintroduce it at anytime in the future. In the mean time I keep on hearing updated info on tooling that takes advantage of project.json such as nuget so where you can actually rely on this is something that is unclear to me at this point.
We are migrating over to using packages and NuGet for managing our dependencies on 3rd party components. This works well when referencing packages from within Visual Studio or building on the build server via msbuild.
However there are a number of files that we would like to access in our build scripts and installers. Previously these would be in source control with a well known path, now as the version of the package that we are consuming changes so the path to the package and hence the files is changing.
Is there a simple way I can get the path to a given package? The best solution I currently have is to search for all packages.config files and extract the package version from them.
Examples of the files that we need to access are
The NUnit console executable from the NUnit.Runners package for running unit tests.
License files from various packages that we redistribute with our installer.
Using the packages.config file is a pretty good solution. NuGet itself uses two approaches:
Reading the package information from the packages.config and using that to resolve to the packages path.
Enumerating all the directories in the packages directory.
You could use NuGet.Core to do either of the above if you do not want to write the code yourself. The classes that can be used are the DefaultPackagePathResolver, the PackageReferenceFile and LocalPackageRepository or SharedPackageRepository.
One problem with the second approach is that sometimes NuGet may occasionally leave behind NuGet packages that are not necessarily referenced by a project. In that case looking at the package directories may give you the incorrect information.
The only other approach I can think of might be to read the project files looking for the assembly references. Although that would not work for a solution level package such as NUnit.Runners.
I am looking to build projects on a build server (right now it is just a server but I want to use MSBuild to build projects on there). I want to use PowerShell scripts to get my code from a repository (Doesn't matter what type), put the source into a common directory, put all dependencies into a common directory (similar to how it is build in my workspace on my local machine), build everything and put all the deployable binaries into a bin which I will be moving to the deployment directories using other Powershell scripts.
I assume I am going to have to have MSBuild installed on the server that I will doing all of this on. Do I need to have the .Net framework installed on that server to accomplish this? Do I just need the EXE to have this work? Is there a good way to managed dependencies? Should I have them in a specific folder?
A lot of the core .NET assemblies are stored in the Windows Global Assembly Cache (GAC). You won't have to worry about those. Yes, you'll need the Microsoft .NET Framework installed, in order to compile (build) .NET projects. I believe msbuild.exe is included with the .NET Framework, so you'll find it under a location such as: C:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\msbuild.exe.
Your PowerShell script will have to copy any external dependencies (assemblies (DLLs and EXEs), .NET resource files, image files, external binaries, etc.) to the appropriate target location after compilation, such that the software executes successfully. You'll need to work with your software development team to determine [comprehensively] what those dependencies are.
MsBuild.exe moved, and is now part of Visual Studio as of v2013.
To get the latest version of MsBuild.exe without having to install Visual Studio 2013, download Microsoft Build Tools 2013
Nuget.exe only supports managing packages at a file system/configuration level. The powershell commands command the magic that update the .proj files.
With that said, i need the ability to update a csproj file with the latest version of a NuGet package outside of visual studio (automated).
Basically, how do I use Install-Package (or any of the other methods) inside of an external powershell script of my own?
UPDATE:
I would like to ability to add project references outside of VS for the following reason.
My company has a lot of shared libraries that depend on each other in some cases. I am using TFS Nugetter to build and publish nuget packages from TFS. I want to ensure that the developers can't queue a build (package) unless the project can build and run on all the newer versions. This ensures that all the newer versions of the libraries work with all the newer versions of its dependencies. If the build fails, then you need to update your nuget reference in VS and fix the compiler errors/unit tests.
I have been looking at the NuGet source and I think I found an easy way to reuse NuGet source to modify proj files outside of VS (kinda).
System.Type t = System.Type.GetTypeFromProgID("VisualStudio.DTE.10.0", true);
var dte = (DTE)System.Activator.CreateInstance(t, true);
dte.Solution.Open(
#"C:\Users\paul.knopf\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\SLNMemory\SLNMemory.sln");
Basically, open an in-memory version of visual studio, run the nuget commands, then save.
In a build step, after GetWorkspace, I would like to run this in-memory vs to update all nuget references to the latest version.
What do you think? It would definitely be slow, but we would be on the same code base and have all the functionality we need.
Automating Visual Studio as you describe is certainly a possibility.
Another way I looked at was using SharpDevelop to install NuGet packages outside of Visual Studio. The NuGet PowerShell cmdlets were modified to accept a solution and you could automate installation, including the use of PowerShell scripts in a NuGet package, from the command line. The code has not been updated so it targets an old version of NuGet but could be updated. Again this is similar to your solution and fairly heavyweight solution.