C# using a library - compile from source? Really?

Question

I'm not very experienced in C#, done some small stuff with it, but it's quite similar to Java, only different, so no fuss. For my current project I need a small web server. So I've been looking around and found that a lot of people are doing a HttpListener based thing. Great, I can do that, but I also ran into the Kayak web server (https://github.com/kayak/kayak) and I figured using a little more seasoned framework may be a good idea.

So I started to try and add it to my project; searching for a DLL to add. But it seems I'm suppose to check out the source and compile it using Rake. Really? Is that how frameworks in C# are distributing; 'old' style Unix "please compile me"? Expecting something like Maven may be too much, but... Or is this an exception?

Answer 1

Some open source projects need you to compile them from scratch - others provide NuGet packages. Often a project won't have a pre-packaged build until they reach v1.0, for example.

In the case of Kayak, there is a NuGet package , so that's probably what you should use.

Note that NuGet is only "reasonably" new (last couple of years) so there will be old, stable projects which haven't required any changes recently which may not have packages, and you may well find many developers who are going to use the project who aren't familiar with NuGet.

Answer 2

You are definitely looking for: http://nuget.org/packages/kayak

NuGet can be used from command line or as a Visual Studio addon - both work very well.