Dustin Moris Gorski yesterday published Fund OSS through package managers on his blog over Dusted Codes. In it, he suggests adding payment mechanisms to package managers such as NuGet or NPM, and that’s certainly an option. But it involves creators choosing how much to charge for their packages, and potentially developers having to raise purchase requests every time they want to adopt a new package, and potentially have to pay different creators for different packages on an annual basis,…

One of the great features of .NET Core is that it gives you a simple way to create and distribute CLI tools via NuGet. You just create a Console application, add a few entries to the .csproj file, and publish it to NuGet. Then other people can install it with the dotnet tool install command. I’ve published a couple of tools this way before, but I’ve just published another one so I thought I’d take time to describe the steps involved, as well as a handful of neat NuGet packages…

First up, let me just say that Roslyn, the compiler platform for C# and .NET, is amazing and I love it. I couldn’t have built Visual ReCode without it. But I have run into an issue with the MSBuildWorkspace type that, ostensibly, lets you load .NET solutions quickly and easily.