Many are returning from summer vacation, others have been enjoying the tranquility of summer holiday. Whichever side you’re on, we at MyGet have been watching the NuGet and NPM community news in the past few weeks. In this post, we bring you some interesting blog posts and articles, curated by our MyGet founders Xavier and Maarten. Follow @MyGetTeam on Twitter for more!

NuGet news

On the NuGet blog, the NuGet client 3.5 RC has been announced, with support for new target frameworks and lots of performance improvements. Additionally, the NuGet team started working on better documentation, now available as a preview on http://docspreview.nuget.org.

More from the NuGet team: they made some changes to the expiring API keys policy. At MyGet we’ve always made this opt-in, and the NuGet.org gallery will now do the same.

New to NuGet? Rohit Chopra has you covered with his article “NuGet – A Powerful way to share your code”. While focused on NuGet, it’s a nice summary of why you want to use a package manager in your projects. Xiao Ling has a step-by-step post on creating and publishing .NET Core packages.

Building things in Unity? Wondering what NuGet is? Ashley Davis has you covered with his introduction to using Unity and NuGet. The Unity solution templates don’t easily allow working with NuGet, but there are some easy workarounds. A good example is demonstrated, installing JSON.NET into a Unity project.

Have you been consuming NuGet, and just started looking into creating your own NuGet packages to share them with team mates or with the world? Learn about publishing your first .NET Core NuGet package with AppVeyor and MyGet  - Andrew Lock gives a good step-by-step tutorial on what you need in code, and how AppVeyor and MyGet can be used to build and distribute your code.

On a similar topic, Maarten Balliauw has a post on Building NuGet (.NET Core) using Atlassian Bitbucket Pipelines. Pipelines is Atalassian’s continuous integration service that runs on Docker and Linux. And since .NET Core is a first class citizen on that platform, why not use it to build and test NuGet packages?

NPM news

Let’s start on the tooling side. Node has gotten two new releases, 4.5.0 and 6.4.0. Mostly bugfixes, better profiling support and improvements in objects and function contexts for debuggers. On the npm side, there’s now 2.15.10 and 3.10.7, with improvements to how scoped dependencies are handled and several other bugfixes.

Did you know the two millionth package version was just published to npm? If you have as well, congratulations! This is a pretty epic milestone in the Node.js community.

Laurie Voss, COO at npm, has a great talk titled “Abstractions, npm past, present, future”. It covers what is npm and where it came from, where the ecosystem stands today and what the plans are for the future. Highly recommended!

New to node? Have a look at Node Hero’s blog post series! These thirteen articles cover everything from getting started with node and npm, to building a web app, security, monitoring and all other aspects of building a node application.

Npmjs.org added web hook support a while back. Julian Gruber did a proof-of-concept where updated dependencies are automatically deployed in the application. Not the best idea, given that your deployment may break because of an updated dependency, but still quite cool. Package update? Deploy!

Into the Internet of Things? One such thing is the International Space Station! Dave Johnson has a nice post Node.js IoT: Tracking the ISS through the Sky where he uses JavaScript to capture GPS coordinates from the IIS and compares it to your home location to create a real-time tracker.

We’re thinking about doing this type of post each month. Let us know if you’d like that or not, using the comments below or reach out on Twitter.

Happy packaging!