First-party NuGet Packages & non-developer/premium?
Hi Joe, et al.!
I've started to run int a very mild workflow problem that I wanted to propose a solution to. I've been using a premium license for years on my development machine, but often copy snippets to other machines to run in a one-off way, just using the standard edition to execute them. With lots of my older snippets that I wrote and used in the .NET Framework era, everything was peachy. However since the move to .NET, many of the once "batteries-included" APIs have been broken out of the core runtime and are instead hosted in NuGet packages.
This obviously isn't an issue on my development machine with a developer/premium license, but becomes a hassle when I need to execute the snippet on another machine. As an example, System.IO.Ports is a namespace I make regular use of that was included in .NET Framework since 1.1 I believe? But now with it being in a NuGet package I need to manually grab it, move it to my target machine, and add it to the query in order to execute it. Where as, in the framework days it'd "just work." When it's only one that's not so bad; but when I'm making use of several first-party features that now live in packages, it gets cumbersome quickly.
My proposal is to add first-party (as in, Microsoft's) NuGet packages to the allow list (like packages with LINQPad examples.) Obviously without metrics I can't claim this wouldn't cut into sales of developer/premium licenses, but I personally feel like this would be a happy medium to be closer to functionality that was easily accessible in the .NET Framework era.
Cheers and thanks as usual for the incredible tool!
Comments
When you open a query that has NuGet package references on a machine running the free edition, it should still work. It will ask if you want to restore NuGet packages. Either answer Yes or click the 'Restore Packages' toolbar button that will appear if you answer No (or if the restore fails).
Does this capture your scenario, or is there something I'm missing?
Holy cow, I can't believe I missed this.
My typical go-to was to just open LP while I'm remoted into the machine and just paste the script from my development machine, rather than using the query file. I suppose I made the (clearly incorrect) assumption that that dialog only showed on activated installs.
This certainly does work, thanks for the response!