James Simmonds

First, some history... The advent of NuGet has revolutionised many many aspects of the .Net ecosystem; MyGet, Chocolatey & OctopusDeploy to name a few solutions building upon its success bring even more features to the table. I also spotted that NuGet could solve a problem I was having with my OSS System Monitoring software Wolfpack ; essentially this is a core application framework that uses plugins for extension ( Wolfpack Contrib ) but how to unify, standardise and streamline how these plugins are made available? NuGet to the rescue again - I wrapped the NuGet infrastructure (I deem NuGet to be so ubiquitous and stable that is has transcended into the software "infrastrucuture" hall of fame) with a new OSS project called Sidewinder . Sidewinder allows me to wrap all my little extension and plugins in NuGet packages and deploy them directly from the Wolfpack application - it even allows me to issue a new version of Wolfpack and have Wolfpack update itself, sweet huh...

I'm getting excited about the next release of Wolfpack (v2.3). It's going to be the first application  that uses Sidewinder  (unless someone beats me to it with my own framework!). I'd been discussing updates and NuGet with a few people and wondered how it could be applied to Wolfpack - its plugin architecture makes it a perfect candidate for being able to download or upgrade plugins plus I also wanted to explore a better way of upgrading the entire install - make this as painless as possible. Taking inspiration from the NuGet.exe commandline app that self updates I had a look at the code and took the plunge and created Sidewinder. I'll let you investigate Sidewinder yourself (if it sounds interesting) but wanted to share what this will mean when it lands in the next version of Wolfpack and how I plan to use it. Wolfpack is a pluggable, modular system - a number of contrib projects have sprung up and a few dedicated individuals have invested time and effort into a...