At the beginning of the year I blogged quite a bit about a set of libraries that we use at Built to Roam that are available either from NuGet (https://www.nuget.org/packages?q=BuildIt) or as source on GitHub (https://github.com/builttoroam/BuildIt). These started a few years ago as an accumulation of helper functions for building, as the time Windows Phone applications. Since then the libraries have matured a bit and have evolved somewhat. The BuildIt.General library is still just a collection of helper method, whilst some, like BuildIt.Lifecycle, are more framework in nature. Over the coming weeks we’re investing a bit into tidying up these libraries, including:
- Migrating any of the libraries that were targeting PCL profile 259 across to .NET Standard 1.0
- Updating, where possible, all NuGet references
- Setting up an automated build and release process, including support for publishing directly to NuGet
- Rationalise the number of libraries on NuGet – namely where there are platform specific libraries, these will be combined in with the core library (eg BuildIt.General.UWP will get packaged with BuildIt.General and will be installed for UWP projects)
- Add some additional packages
- BuildIt.Media.UWP – This allows you to easily add Cortana voice commands for controlling media playback with the MediaElement control
- BuildIt.Web.Config (this name may change) – This allows you to easily define application configuration values server side and have them flow to the client application
Right now, we’re going through and migrating the libraries to .NET Standard. This is a painful process as there are often NuGet references that don’t work with .NET Standard – we’re either removing these or deciding to wait on the package author to update. During this phase a lot of the packages will be marked as beta – you should be able to start using these libraries but just be aware we haven’t completed the migration, so things may change over the coming weeks.