NuGet Packages

I first started looking at creating NuGet packages as a way to help deal with Technical Debt. You see, the company I was working for had some very old code and the .NET Framework was no longer properly supported. I knew it was possible to write a NuGet package that would support multiple versions of the .NET Framework and then make it as easy as using the 4.5 version of the package with the existing code, then changing the Framework in the project.

To test this, I wrote my first NuGet package, CompromisedCredentialsChecker. It was a simple .NET interface for the Have I Been Pwned API. It required using different code for multiple items between the .NET Frameworks and I found it was fairly easy to write, document and test.

I also used GitHub Actions to build and test the package, then push it to NuGet.org, complete with showing that the library passes all tests and finally adding badges to the ReadMe file to show the status of the build and tests.

Now it is time to tackle this poor website. Sadly, it has been neglected for quite some time. On top of that, the computer I was hosting it on decided to stagger to a slow death. Fortunately, I had everything backed up but it was a very old computer and running a very old OS. So I took the opportunity to upgrade the hardware and OS. Unfortunately, the site did not want to just run on the new server. So I am writing some basic nuget packages to handle all of the grunt work (data access, logging, caching) that I can plug and play as much as possible into the existing code base. I expect those NuGet packages to be available in the next couple of weeks as soon as this web site is serving up quotes, crossword dictionary information and all the other dynamic content it used to.