So my last day at Microsoft ended up being a very long one as the NuGet team worked late into the evening to deployan updated version of NuGet.org. I’m very happy to be a part of this as my last act as a Microsoft employee. This is complete re-write of the gallery.

Why a rewrite? We’ve learned a lot since we first launched, and our needs have evolved to the point where a rewrite made sense. The new implementation is a vanilla ASP.NET MVC 3 application and highly optimized to be a gallery with just the features we need.

For example, we made extensive use of Mvc Mini Profiler to ensure pages made the least number of database queries as necessary. Also, the site is now hosted in Azure!

What’s in this new implementation?

There’s a lot of great improvements. I won’t provide a comprehensive list, but I will provide a taste. Matthew and others will write about the improvements in more detail:

  • Search on every page! This seems obvious, but we didn’t have this in the old gallery. That deficiency is now just a bad memory. Also, the search is way faster!
  • Package owners are displayed more prominently. In the old gallery, the owners of the package weren’t displayed. Anywhere. Which was a terrible experience because the owners are the people who matter. A package owner is associated with an account. The “author” of a package is simply metadata and could be anyone.
  • Owner profiles. Click on a package owner to see the package owner’s profile. Today, the only thing you see is a gravatar for the owner and the list of packages that person owns. In the future, we might include more profile information.
  • Adding a package owner requires acceptance. In the past, you could add anyone else as an owner of your package and they’d immediately become an owner of a package. Now that we show the list of owners next to a package, that’s not such a good thing. In the new gallery, when you try and add an owner, the gallery sends them an email inviting them to become an owner. This way MyCrappyPackage can’t add you as an owner as a way of boosting their reputation at the expense of yours.
  • Package stats are displayed more prominently. We wanted to make the package stats very prominent.
  • Package unlisting. Packages can now be unlisted. This effectively hides the package, but the package is still used to resolve dependencies.
  • Cleaner markup and design. The HTML markup is way cleaner and streamlined. For example, we reduced the CSS files from 20 to 1.
  • Cleaner URLs.For example, the new package feed URL is now http://nuget.org/api/v1/. In the future, we’ll probably use content negotiation so we won’t even need versioned URLs for the package feed. The NuGet 1.5 client will continue to work.
  • And it’s WAY FASTER! I almost forgot to mention just how much faster the gallery is now than before.

What about NuGet 1.6?

There are some features of the Gallery you won’t see until we release NuGet 1.6. We want to make sure the site works well before we deploy NuGet 1.6. Once we do that, you’ll also see support for SemVer (Semantic Versioning) and Prerelease packages in the Gallery.