NetStandard, what is it and why do I care?

Over the past couple of years there hasn’t been a single project where at some point or another it hasn’t encountered NuGet pain – this is the pain associated with trying to upgrade packages, only to discover that you have to carefully select specific package versions due to incompatibilities, and then try and fight the nasty Visual Studio NuGet package manager interface to get them to install correctly. I’m no expert on topics like PCL Profiles, so I thought that I’d spend some time researching a bit more about what’s going on, and just why NuGet seems to fragile. This interest was also driven by the recent release of the .NET Platform Standard (ie NetStandard) and the fact that I need to migrate the BuildIt libraries we use, away from PCL Profiles (yay!) across to NetStandard.

As I said, I’m no guru on this, so rather than post third or fourth hand info. Here’s where I started: Oren Novotny’s post entitled Portable- is dead, long live NetStandard. Start there, and make sure you follow the links in his post as they provide some essential background reading on the topic.

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