Introducing NuGet Docs: Community Driven Documentation

http://docs.nuget.org

Introducing NuGet Docs: http://docs.nuget.org! NuGet Docs is a community driven documentation site that provides guides, walkthroughs, and information about anything and everything NuGet related. NuGet Docs is your new resource for learning and understanding how to use NuGet to the fullest. There is information about how to use NuGet to consume packages, information about how to create your own packages, and even information about how to contribute to NuGet along with much more. This is the first iteration of the site and the documentation that is contained on it. So we hope you understand it might be rough around the edges, but here is the good news its community driven so you can contribute your knowledge and understand to help make it better. More about how to do that later.

Let’s talk about the reason, goal, and focus behind NuGet Docs for a minute. Historically speaking open source software lacks good documentation. NuGet Docs is the NuGet team’s effort to make documentation a first class citizen. We want our documentation to be just as awesome as our product, because no matter how awesome NuGet is if no one can understand it, it’s nothing more than “the suck.” The focus of the site is really about providing the user with the information they need. We don’t want so much flashy chrome that it blinds the user from the information they are looking for. First and foremost the number one priority of the NuGet Docs site is the content! Another key aspect of NuGet Docs is that we designed it to be easy to create, update, and maintain the documentation. So let’s talk more about how we achieved that.

NuGet Docs is an ASP.NET WebPages application extended to support the use of markdown files (.markdown). What this means is that the core of the site is coded in ASP.NET WebPages while the documentation itself is written in markdown. For those of you unfamiliar with markdown it is basically a more human readable way to annotate a document so that HTML can be created from it. More information about Markdown can be found here. By using markdown we allow the authors of the documentation to have a better experience while still allowing rich visual content to be created. We also wanted it to be easy to create new content on the site. With that in mind all that is required to create a new page is add a markdown file and it will be added to the site and show up in the menus. There are some conventions that need to be followed but you can read more about that in the “Contributing to NuGet Documentation” page on NuGet Docs (I know, so meta).

So what are you waiting for? Head over to the NuGet Docs site and read up about anything and everything NuGet. When you’re done why not take the time to contribute your knowledge to collective (Star Trek reference) and write some documentation yourself? For those of you that do contribute to NuGet Docs we have a preview site (http://preview.docs.nuget.org) that all changes will be pushed to and then when a new version of NuGet is released we will port the preview site to the live site. This means that you can even help write documentation for features that are not in the current released version but are in CI builds. We know you love being on the bleeding edge. Also we appreciate hearing your feedback and hearing about bugs you encountered (hey, why aren’t you submitting patched for them?). You can provide those opinions and issue on the NuGet Docs CodePlex site.