NuGet References: publishing my first open source extension to the DevStore
Last week I had the pleasure of spending time with a bunch of friends at the OuterConf 2013, including pretty much the entire NuGet team. I also could attend to the hackathon they organized, and I got to hack what I think is a pretty cool Visual Studio 2012 extension: NuGet References.
An improved NuGet experience
The idea is simple enough: I wanted to leverage some new extensibility hooks in VS2012 to show installed nuget packages right inside a packages.config file, like so:
And once you have the nodes in there, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to update and uninstall right from there?
And why not allow me to see key information about the package on the properties window?
Cool enough 
Monetizing your creations
Now, after the extension was “done” (there’s a TON more that can be added to it! This is just the start), I realized I had put quite a few hours (more like days by now!) into it. So even if I do want my work to be open source so that eventually it can make it into NuGet’s core tooling, I could certainly use a few bucks to pay for the coffee and beer I put into it ...