Hi! ever wanted created a dll and nuget package and wanted to get a report of all of the assembly changes? Well now there is a dotnet tool for that!

Introducing assembly-differ

To install globally:

dotnet tool install -g assembly-differ

But installing globally is not very repeatable build friendly so lets use local tools that were introduced with .NET core 3.0. Andrew Lock did a fantastic blog post introducing these

Create a manifest file locally if one does not exist already:

dotnet new tool-manifest

dotnet tool install assembly-differ

Now you can run e.g:

dotnet assembly-differ "nuget|Elasticsearch.Net|7.3.0|netstandard2.0" "nuget|Elasticsearch.Net|7.4.1|netstandard2.0"
dotnet assembly-differ "nuget|Newtonsoft.Json|10.0.1|netstandard2.0" "nuget|Newtonsoft.Json|12.0.1|netstandard2.0"

To get the differences between two nuget packages.

Differ builds on the amazing work done by JustAssembly, licensed under Apache 2.0. We currently run on a fork that we know works on linux/osx as well.

We hope this tool in the future will be able to:

• emit standard out errors if breaking changes exists so this could be easy leveraged in CI,
• Pass the tool with the version you intend to release and have the tool report the version it thinks it should be based on the differences between the assemblies
• Wrap all of this in Github Actions

Trying to blog on the eve before a vacation does not leave me much time to fully do all its capabilites justice so expect more blog posts in the future!

Comments

Comments on this post are linked to this post's issue page on GitHub