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 I asked GitHub Copilot how I could do this in VS Code, and it pointed me to a .NET CLI tool called dotnet-outdated-tool.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dotnet tool install --global dotnet-outdated-tool
Running the outdated command from the terminal evals my project/solution and tells me what versions are available.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dotnet outdated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To view all the options, run dotnet outdated --help.
https://github.com/dotnet-outdated/dotnet-outdated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dotnet list package --include-prerelease --framework net8.0-ios17.2 --outdated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". :)
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