Professional C# and .NET, 2021st Edition

14Libraries, Assemblies, Packages, and NuGet

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Differences between libraries, assemblies, packages
• Creating libraries
• Using .NET Standard
• Creating NuGet packages
• Supporting multiple platforms with NuGet packages
• Initializing libraries

CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The source code for this chapter is available on the book page at www.wiley.com. Click the Downloads link. The code can also be found at https://github.com/ProfessionalCSharp/ProfessionalCSharp2021 in the directory 2_Libs/Libraries.

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

• UsingLibs
• CreateNuGet

All the projects have nullable reference types enabled.

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 known as DLL hell.

.NET tried to solve this with assemblies. Assemblies are libraries that could ...