NuGet Package Restore Strategies

Question

My sincerest apologies, if this has been asked before. I've searched the site but have not seen an answer for what I'm looking for yet.

For years, my company has referenced custom binaries in a local folder hierarchy within source control. We're in the process of changing our source control, and in the process are defining new strategies for many things. One of the things I've been working on is to setup a local NuGet feed for our custom packages to replace the old source control folder method. I've been able to successfully create custom packages and using the package restore feature, log into our build box to restore both NuGet packages from our local feed, as well as those from the official NuGet feed. Everything has worked well up to this point.

The time has come to begin testing our migration process from our old source control to the new source control, and convert all of the references over to NuGet packages. Where needed, we're creating packages and placing them on our local NuGet server. The issue I came across today involves a project that uses an old version of a vendor library. I searched the official NuGet feed and found the library as a package, but the particular version we used at the time is no longer available.

I know from the fact that package restoration was a highly requested feature, that other companies are already employing the strategy we're attempting now. My question is what strategy is your company implementing when operating under this criteria? Is there a best practice we should be considering?

Thanks for your time and assistance.

Answer 1

That's quite a big question to answer so I'll recommend you some resources to read up on this topic.

I wrote an MSDN article on some patterns and practices I'd recommend when using NuGet into the organization. Maybe you'll find something useful in there: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj851071.aspx.

There's also the book Pro NuGet available at http://bit.ly/ProNuGet.