In this article, we are going to learn about package validation in .Net
package validation was introduced in .NET 6 SDK. It allows developers to ensure the packages we get from NuGet package managers and even verify whether the NuGet package manager is consistent.
Package validation helps us in following things to verify
- It allows the developer to validate that there are no breaking changes across all the versions of packages.
- Package Validation allows developers to validate that all our packages are consistent and well-formed.
- It will help developers catch any applicability holes.
- Validates that all packages have the same set of public APIs for different runtime-specific implementations.
Setup package validation in Project
To set up the package validation for the application, we need to set up a property in csproj file like below.
To set up this, we need to make the EnablePackageValidation property true
How to validate the packages
1. Validating Compatible Frameworks
The Validating Compatible Frameworks validate that the code compiled against one framework can run against all the other frameworks in the multi-targeting packages.
Package Validation will catch all the errors at the package installation time, for ex.
Suppose we are writing a game code in which we do many string manipulation. We need to support both the .NET Framework and the .NET Core consumers. So we started with targeting .NET Standard 2.0, but later on, we realize we want to use spans in .NET 6.0 to avoid the unnecessary string allocations, So to do that, we now want the multi-target for .NET Standard 2.0 and .NET 6.0, below is the code for same.
Now if we install the package in the project (using DotNet package manager or cmd) it will give the below error
So as shown in error, we should not exclude DoStringManipulation(string). Instead, we need to give another DoStringManipulation (ReadoOnlySpan<char>) method for .NET 6.0, so the code will be like below
2. Baseline version validator
The Baseline version validator validates the packages library project against the previously released packages, basically the stable version. Package validation identifies any breaking change.
To use it, we need to add the PackageValidationBaselineVersion or PackageValidationBaselinePath in our project.
We can even use the PackageValidationBaselinePath property as well to identify the breaking changes
3. Validation Against Diff Runtimes
The Compatible runtime validator validates run times assemblies that are compatible with the compile time assemblies.
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