Can’t Miss! Part II: OpenWrap, a promising .NET package (export) management system

I’ve recently stumbled upon a very interesting package management system for .NET: OpenWrap. It’s no surprise that it’s been idealized and is being developed by the talented @serialseb (blog) (github), the same guy who developed the OpenRasta web framework.

I haven’t really found the time to test OpenWrap thoroughly, but knowing the thrills and pangs one get on setting up a package management system for .NET, I immediately acknowledged the importance of this project. Sure, there are other cool alternatives being developed right now such as Bricks and WebGAC; you can even set up Ivy to play nice with .NET, as we’ve successfully done at Locaweb. But regarding the emergence of competitive solutions for package management in the .NET ecosystem, Sebastien couldn’t put it a better way:

(…) Package management is going to be the next Vietnam war on .net, and many people will come up with different solutions. It’s all for the best, and most projects, as they have done many times before, will die off on their own. This is to be expected. As such, I implore the .net world to let enough time for each of those projects to compete purely on the quality and functionality they provide, and let the best one eliminate naturally the other ones. Don’t succumb to the belief that standardizing early will help, or that popularity would be a distinctive factor. If we fuck-up the package management story on .net, we may never recover, so give it a bit of time and be circumspect in your analysis.

That being said, this post aims only at showing what’s out there regarding package management, with a special emphasis on OpenWrap. Sebastien has been posting several articles on his blog about how the project is developing, so it should be interesting to watch his progress. Last but not least, it is an open-source project, so feedback/contribution from the community should be more than welcome.