Summary

In this chapter, we covered the power of NuGet: its simplicity (it enables you to publish and consume packages) and its extensibility (the three mayor clients to work with NuGet can be extended with more power).

We’ve created extensions for all three clients: we’ve extended the NuGet command line with an analyze command and have demonstrated an easy way to install these additional commands.

The Package Manager Console was extended with several cmdlets; some simple commands that instruct Visual Studio to search for symbols or remove and sort using directives. We’ve covered how to create more complex commands with tab expansions support for creating an experience similar to IntelliSense for the users of your extensions.

NuGet Package Explorer can also be extended. We’ve demonstrated this with a plug-in providing you with ILSpy integration, allowing you to disassemble binary package content right from within NuGet Package Explorer. No need to extract the desired assembly from the package, open Windows Explorer windows to find ILSpy.exe and then manually dragging the assembly onto the ILSpy window. It is a much better experience to automate such things.