Posted by
Senior Software Developer, Microsoft Open Source Technology Center
Hundreds of thousands of open source applications run on Windows today, but a lot of open source software can still be hard to find and deploy on Windows because many developers work on projects independently. Today’s release of NuGet 2.5 and the beta release of the CoApp PowerShell Tools go a long way to address this challenge, removing the duplications of effort by providing a central repository of high-quality, commonly-used open source libraries and languages.
Rewind to last year. CoApp (an open source project I launched three years ago) got together with the NuGet team, folks from Visual C++ team, and community members, to outline how we could align our efforts to support packages for all developers on Windows – not just.NET – across all of our products, including Windows Server, Windows desktop, Windows Store apps and Windows Phone.
That collaboration has since resulted in significantly improved support for building quality open source software on Windows, helping developers easily find the resources they need without having to do it all themselves. With the integrated CoApp tools and NuGet 2.5, C/C++ developers can now create and maintain their open source software and projects with the simplicity that Windows .NET and Web developers have already enjoyed in recent years.
I’m looking forward to next month, when we have an opportunity to collectively kick the tires on these releases at the Northwest Open Source Hackathon. Stay tuned on the blog, as I’ll be reporting back on the results of our two days of coding and camaraderie.
For more details on how CoApp and NuGet are improving support for open source developers, please see the Visual C++, NuGet and CoApp team blogs. Let us know in the comments what you think of these new resources.