Using Nuget in development environment - best practices / how to

Question

Trying to figure out the best way to use Nuget in a development environment to manage our own libraries.

We want to standardize on Nuget way of doing things for our 3rd

Answer 1

I'd suggest you use separate network shares or feeds (similar to what myget.org supports in the cloud) for different scenarios. You could imagine creating a CI share, a QA share, a Releases share, ...

Make people working on the referenced library do CI builds that drop CI packages on the CI repository for instance, and have them picked up by other projects (who just need to do a simple update, could be automated through PowerShell in pre-build: check for new version, if so, update).

Just make sure that when products release their milestones, they also release with released dependencies (could be as simple as switching feeds, releases will always have a higher version number than CI builds).

Hope that helps! Cheers, Xavier

Answer 2

If you're working on the source code for the lib and the main app at the same time, I'd say NuGet is probably not a good solution. I think it'll only work in situations where you work with a "stable" version of the library that don't need to change frequently during the development of your main app.

That said - is it possible the development on your library could be done in isolation? You already mention you're doing TDD on the lib, so why can't that work be done, then built, deployed, then the main app work done?