Published .Net Orchestration library to nuget via AppVeyor

Introduction

There is no need to explain about the importance of nuget package ecosystem to .Net development community. Now a days its very difficult to consider someone as .Net if he don't have a nuget package. Of course now I can tell because I just published my first nuget package :)

Its the same Orchestration library I have hosted some months back.

Standard way

How to package our .Net library(.dll or scripts) as nuget package and publish to www.nuget.org is documented very clearly in nuget web site. Link below.

http://docs.nuget.org/create/creating-and-publishing-a-package

So I followed the same guidelines and published it. All manual and using Visual Studio and command line tool nuget.exe. Its available in below location.

https://www.nuget.org/packages/Orchestration

CI & CD way

Manually publishing every time from our development machine is really boring task. Its highly repetitive. Also how to ensure that the the library actually works after each change? If we cannot solve our this problem, how can we solve other's problem.

As everybody knows, the answer to this problem is continuous integration. If that is hosted its too easy. If its free too, don't ask any more questions, just do it.

As we have seen in some of previous posts, AppVeyor is the best place for doing free hosted CI & CD for .Net projects at this time. I will highly recommend than Microsoft's Visual Studio Online service which gives some free build minutes. Infact Microsoft itself using AppVeyor to do their integration.

Below are the official AppVeyor documentation about how to setup CI for nuget projects.

http://www.appveyor.com/docs/nuget#automatic-publishing-of-nuget-projects
http://blog.appveyor.com/blog/2014/02/21/nuget-support-in-appveyor-ci

Compilation of the project and running unit tests are trivial. There won't be usually any issues at all. But we want to automatically create the nuget package and increment it's version, we may need to think twice.

There are basically 2 options. The first option is kind of obsolete now.

1. Explicitly run our own script to auto increment the nupkg file version and fire the nuget pack command to create the .nupkg file
1. http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/806257/Automating-NuGet-Package-Creation-using-AppVeyor
2. https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Create-and-Push-NuGet-c6072402
2. Use AppVeyor's out of the box settings to auto increment the version.
1. Enable Assembly patching in AppVeyor
2. Use $version$ token in version property inside .nuspec file
3. Enable the nuget build in AppVeyor to automatically package the file.

We can take the second approach which is out of the box which don't.require any coding. Remember less code less defects!!!. Once this is working file we can see the .nupkg file in the build artifacts. From there we can push via AppVeyor itself. We need to setup our nuget API key either in appveyor.yml (encrypted) or in the web interface.

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I was in little trouble in the beginning to do things without custom scripts and contacted their support. They helped immediately. I really appreciate it.
http://help.appveyor.com/discussions/problems/525-nupkg-getting-created-at-same-version-every-time