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As you might know, NuGet has been having some performance (and timeout) related issues recently. Earlier this week, we completed a deployment that helped, but it didn't address everything. Many users are still seeing slow responses or even timeouts when trying to use the ‘Manage NuGet Packages’ dialog in Visual Studio. Ongoing Investigation The deployment earlier this week greatly improved the packages page on the gallery, but it didn't address the Visual Studio dialog performance as much as we had hoped. Since that deployment, we’ve been focusing on the queries behind the Visual Studio dialog. We have found that the SQL queries that get executed from the ‘Manage NuGet Package’ dialog are not great. While...

As mentioned in a previous post , we’ve been working to address some performance problems on the NuGet Gallery . The fixes we have in place include some time-consuming database migrations. During our dry run deployments, we found that virtually all requests to the database will time out while these migrations are running. We have decided to take the precaution of shutting the gallery down during these migrations to ensure the best and fastest possible deployment. We are sorry for the inconvenience this will cause. Timing The nuget.org website is expected to be down from 11pm-12am PDT tonight. During this time, all requests to browse, search, install, or update packages will fail. You will see errors in Visual Studio when you use the Online...

Since August 16th, and especially since August 21st, the NuGet Gallery has been exhbiting intermittent performance issues. Some users are reporting errors when attempting to browse or search for NuGet packages from Visual Studio or other clients. Many users are reporting that browsing and searching are slow. There have also been timeout errors when browsing the gallery’s packages page . During this time, we have been communicating with many of you on twitter, under the #nuget tag , as well as in JabbR’s #nuget room . We truly appreciate your patience and understanding with us. Status We have been working to address these performance issues over the last several days, and we hope to have a deployment in place this evening (August...

Damn, Rob saw right through the PR lies of Phil Haack about the new NuGet gallery and figured it all out. Kidding, kidding. For your enjoyment and context, here is Rob’s post: http://wekeroad.com/2011/12/06/nuget-and-orchard/ Phil made a thoughtful answer to the post where he gives the rationale behind the decision: http://wekeroad.com/2011/12/06/nuget-and-orchard/#comment-380571113 What I want to address here is what that means (or not) about Orchard. “Why wasn’t it fast before?” Because by default, back when the NuGet gallery was first built, Orchard was grossly under optimized. We made a lot of progress, but it still is under optimized out of the box --in a number of ways-- which is why we’re having this discussion for the 1.4 release: http...

So my last day at Microsoft ended up being a very long one as the NuGet team worked late into the evening to deployan updated version of NuGet.org. I’m very happy to be a part of this as my last act as a Microsoft employee. This is complete re-write of the gallery. Why a rewrite? We’ve learned a lot since we first launched, and our needs have evolved to the point where a rewrite made sense. The new implementation is a vanilla ASP.NET MVC 3 application and highly optimized to be a gallery with just the features we need. For example, we made extensive use of Mvc Mini Profiler to ensure pages made the least number of database queries as necessary. Also, the site is now hosted in Azure! What’s in this new implementation? There’s a lot of great improvements...

It’s not every day you write this sort of blog post. And you hope it’s not something you do so often that you ever get good at it. I’m certainly sucking up a storm here. Just last month I hit my four year mark at Microsoft . I reflected on the sheer joy I experienced working with such smart people on cool projects. I’ve been very lucky and fortunate to be able to speak about these projects at many conferences, meeting so many interesting attendees. It’s been a real blast. Today, I write a different sort of post. It was a tough decision to make, but I’ve decided to leave Microsoft to try something different. This is my last week as a Microsoft employee. On Monday, December 5, 2011 I’ll come into the office, hand over my card key, the launch codes...

The Backstory: I was thinking since the NuGet .NET package management site is starting to fill up that I should start looking for gems (no pun intended) in there. You know, really useful stuff that folks might otherwise not find. I'll look for mostly open source projects, ones I think are really useful. I'll look at how they built their NuGet packages, if there's anything interesting about the way the designed the out of the box experience (and anything they could do to make it better) as well as what the package itself does.  Today, it's imageresizer . Bertrand Le Roy has long been an advocate of doing image resizing correctly on .NET and particularly on ASP.NET. Last week he posted a great post on a new library to choose...

We made a recent change to make it easy to update the NuGet documentation . In this post, I’ll cover what the change was, why we made it, and how it makes it easier to contribute to our documentation. Our docs run as a simple ASP.NET Web Pages application that renders documentation written in the Markdown format. The Markdown text is not stored in a database, but live as files that are part of the application source code. That allows us to use source control to version our docs. We used to host the source for the docs site in Mercurial (hg) on CodePlex.com . Under the old system, it took the following to contribute docs. Install Mercurial (TortoiseHG for example) if you didn’t already have it. Fork our repository and clone it to your local machine...

Recently, a group of covert ninjas within my organization started to investigate what it would take to change our internal build and continuous integration systems (CI) to take advantage of NuGet for many of our products, and I need your input! Hmm, off by one error slays me again. -Image from Ask A Ninja. Click on the image to visit. Ok, they’re not really covert ninjas, that just sounds much cooler than a team of slightly pudgy software developers. Ok, they’ve told me to speak for myself, they’re in great shape! In response to popular demand, we changed our minds and decided to support Semantic Versioning (SemVer) as the means to specify pre-release packages for the next version of NuGet (1.6). In part, this is the cause of the delay for this...

NOTE: This blog post covers features in a pre-release product, ASP.NET MVC 4 Developer Preview . You’ll see we call out those two words a lot to cover our butt. The specifics about the feature will change and this post will become out-dated. You’ve been warned. All good recipes call for a significant amount of garlic. Introduction Last week I spoke at the //BUILD conference on building mobile web applications with ASP.NET MVC 4 . In the talk, I demonstrated a recipe I wrote that automates the process to create mobile versions of desktop views. Recipes are a great way to show off your lack of UI design skills like me! In this blog post, I’ll walk through the basic steps to write a recipe. But first, what exactly is a recipe? Obviously I’m not...