Professional C# 7 and .NET Core 2.0, 7th Edition

19Libraries, Assemblies, Packages, and NuGet

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Differences between libraries, assemblies, packages
• Creating libraries
• Using .NET Standard
• Using shared projects
• Creating NuGet packages

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com on the Download Code tab. The source code is also available at https://github.com/ProfessionalCSharp/ProfessionalCSharp7 in the directory Libraries.

The code for this chapter is divided into the following major examples:

• UsingLibs
• UsingLegacyLibs
• UsingASharedProject
• CreateNuGet

THE HELL OF LIBRARIES

Libraries make it possible for you to reuse code in multiple applications. With Windows, libraries have a long history, and architecture guidelines have taken different directions with newer technologies. Before .NET, dynamic link libraries (DLLs) could be shared between different applications. These DLLs have been installed in a shared directory. It wasn’t possible to have multiple versions of these libraries on the same system, but they should have been upward compatible. Of course, this wasn’t always the case. In addition, there were problems with application installations that did not pay attention to the guidelines and replaced a shared library with an older one. This was the DLL Hell.

.NET tried to solve this with assemblies. Assemblies are libraries that could be shared. In addition to normal DLLs, assemblies contain extensible metadata with information ...