Managing NuGets in VS Code

I do most of my app building on a MacBook with Visual Studio Code, and that means I am learning new ways of doing things in the absence of an IDE.

One of the main things I miss about using an IDE is the NuGet package manager. Actually, I hesitate to say "miss" because I never liked the package manager experiences anyway. I would only use them to see versions, and then I would hand edit my csproj file before doing a dotnet restore or just building.

In most cases I can open NuGet.org to look for the version information of the package in question, but that means changing context from VS Code which bums me out. I asked GitHub Copilot how I could do this in VS Code, and it pointed me to a .NET CLI tool called dotnet-outdated-tool.

To install:

dotnet tool install --global dotnet-outdated-tool 

Running the outdated command from the terminal evals my project/solution and tells me what versions are available. Sweet!

dotnet outdated

From there I can update one ore more packages, or return to editing the csproj as I prefer to do. And this tool does more. I can filter on a partial or full package name like Microsoft.

To view all the options, run dotnet outdated --help.

https://github.com/dotnet-outdated/dotnet-outdated

Just dotnet please

You can (of course) do all this with the .NET CLI and not use that tool. It's a bit more typing. Here I filter down to the iOS target framework.

dotnet list package --include-prerelease --framework net8.0-ios17.2 --outdated

I do like the visibility this gives me to the sources being used. I can even restrict to a specific source.

See dotnet list package docs for more info.

With these commands I can be productive managing my NuGets in VS Code developing .NET MAUI apps. And as Maddy Montaquila says, working with the command line "makes me feel like a real developer". :)