Now VersionEye has support for .NET

VersionEye had already support for 12 package managers and now we are adding Nuget, the package manager for the .NET platform from Microsoft! As Microsoft Windows is all about continuous updating, Microsoft will like VersionEye very much, because VersionEye is continuous updating for .NET packages 🙂

With fixed releases and snapshots together VersionEye is currently monitoring more than 70K open source .NET packages on Nuget. Here are the numbers from .NET / Nuget compared with package managers from other languages.

The above chart can be viewed on the VersionEye statistic page and is updated once a week. The numbers representing projects in official package mangers. Random OS projects on GitHub/Bitbucket are not taken into the calculation! Currently the C# .NET community has less open source packages than the Python, Ruby, PHP, Java or Node.JS community. As Microsoft changed their open source strategy a couple months ago, this might change in future. But this is the status quo!

Every .NET package has his own page at VersionEye, like this one for example.

Now you can follow any .NET package at VersionEye and you will receive an email notification as soon a new release for that package is available. But that’s not all. VersionEye is showing the most important KPIs to the package in the right upper corner. KPIs like average release time, external references, the license of the package and a dependency badge which can be integrated into README pages at GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket.

VersionEye is also creating author profiles for the contributors of the open source libraries. By clicking on an author icon on a package detail page the author page shows up. Like this one for example.

On the author page you can see to which other .NET packages the author contributed to and what his/her keywords are. The keywords are clickable as well. This is for example the keyword page for JSON.

The keyword page can be filtered down by language and now C# is on the filter as well.

But the coolest feature is that VersionEye can monitor a Nuget project in your Git repository and notify you about out-dated dependencies and license violations. Now VersionEye can monitor project.json and *.nuspec files on GitHub, Bitbucket and Stash.

For monitoring one of this files, simply flip the switch in our Git integration view. The project report looks like that.

It’s that easy to get notified about out-dated dependencies and license violations 🙂 Projects like this one can be created and update via the VersionEye API as well. There already many native VersionEye plugins for build tools and package managers like Maven, SBT, Gradle and NPM which are using the VersionEye API. I’m looking forward to see some native VersionEye plugins for the .NET platform as well 🙂

TODOs

2 Things are still not finished for the .NET integration and are still ongoing.

1. Release Dates: On some packages you will see “Release 116 years ago”. Of course that is wrong 🙂 On some packages the release date was not set correctly. Currently a background job is running which is fetching the release dates from an alternative source.
2. License Names: The Nuget API doesn’t expose license names, only links to licenses. Currently we are working on it to resolve the links to meaning full names. For a couple thousand packages this is already done but for the majority this process is still ongoing.

Feedback

The .NET integration in VersionEye is pretty fresh. We rely on your feedback! Please test it and let us know if something is wrong. You can reach us on Twitter or simply open a ticket at GitHub. By the way. VersionEye itself is open source. Pull requests are welcome 😉