NuGet has gone through a lot of changes over the last 10 years. From the package manager console, standalone NuGet.exe, and integration of NuGet into the .NET SDK, we have always relied on the open source community to help evolve and advance NuGet to meet the needs of the .NET ecosystem.

Since NuGet has been on GitHub, the repository has resolved nearly 10,000 issues. Over the last 6 months, we focused on solving popular bugs filed through the GitHub repository and Developer Community. As a result of that effort, we addressed over 40 issues to improve your developer quality of life.

Season of Giving

For the next 6 months, we will continue giving back. This time, we’ll be focusing on popular feature asks by the community. These are issues that have significant upvotes(👍), community engagement, limit other projects, enhance the CLI experience, and improve the overall quality of life when managing packages.

Issues tagged with the Category:SeasonOfGiving label are issues we believe are important and can contribute towards this goal. We know not every highly requested feature or issue is included in this list. We wanted to ensure that each popular ask we identified could be accomplished with the current direction, description, duration, and design created for it. We hope that as we start to pick up these issues, that you’ll participate and help build them together.

Hacktoberfest

Next month, NuGet will participate in Hacktoberfest. Hacktoberfest is a yearly event to encourage people to contribute to open source in October. NuGet will be helping first time contributors practice skills you don’t get to use in your day job, meet new people by collaborating on pull requests, and learn something new in the process.

If you’ve never contributed to the NuGet repositories before, here’s how you can get started.

• Choose the repository and issue you’d like to contribute to.

• Read through the CONTRIBUTING.MD on the repository to learn how to effectively contribute to the repository.

• Send a pull request with your changes!

You don’t have to contribute code to get involved with an open source project. In fact, it’s often the other parts of a project that are overlooked. You’d be doing a huge favor by offering to pitch in with these types of contributions. Here’s a few ideas for how you can contribute outside of code:

• Write a blog about a thing you found neat in NuGet tooling or a cool package that you want to share with others.
• Make changes to the open source project’s documentation to help improve the experience for other contributors.
• Pitch a new proposal for what the team should consider working on in the future.
• Ask clarifying questions on existing issues to move the discussion forward.
• Upvote existing issues that you’d like to see implemented.
• Help others by answering questions on Stack Overflow, Reddit, or Developer Community.
• Organize, tag, and close issues that need attention.
• Review pull requests to provide feedback to others.
• Curate a list of awesome NuGet packages and maintainers.

There are many more creative ways to contribute to an open source project. We’re excited to see what you come up with!

Closing stale issues

Maintaining an open source project that a lot of people use means we can spend less time coding and more time responding to issues.

Over the years we’ve been documenting and communicating our processes for proposing new designs, contributing to the project, yearly product plans, and giving feedback to the project. We’re always experimenting with trying new ways to manage the project.

We’ll be working on an experiment to close stale issues over the next few months. These are issues that we’ve triaged, haven’t been updated in over 2 years, and aren’t highly requested by the community.

We ask that if you see an issue that you deeply care about get closed, that you help our team by providing a quick comment regarding your interest while being patient with us as we try this experiment out.