As Brian Harry recently announced, there will be a Visual Studio 2012 Update 4. With RC2, we’ve updated the NuGet support. In this blog post, I’ll summarize those improvements.

Updated NuGet Client

The RTM version of Visual Studio 2012 included a fairly old version of the NuGet client (2.0). Although the NuGet team regularly ships updated versions via the Visual Studio gallery, many of you haven’t updated your NuGet clients yet – probably because you weren’t aware that an update exists or because you didn’t see a reason to update.

Unfortunately, the NuGet 2.0 client didn’t support portable class libraries (PCL). Most of our packages make use of PCLs which in turn has resulted in many customers reporting bugs that they weren’t able to install our packages in their projects.

RC2 brings NuGet 2.6 (which was the latest version at the time we finalized the work for RC2). This version of NuGet includes two fixes that we believe are most relevant for our customers:

• Support for portable class libraries. This fixes the package installation issues.

• Allows package authors to specify a minimum version of NuGet. This enables us to explicitly indicate a NuGet update is required to consume one of our packages, and customers that aren’t consuming our packages are not forced to update. This also addresses the issue for build servers. If they have a checked-in version of nuget.exe that is older than what is required the build fails with an actionable error message.

Extension and Updates Dialog after installing VS 2012.4 RC2

Support for the “Microsoft and .NET” NuGet Feed

Since more and more functionality of the .NET Framework is published as NuGet packages, we’ve added a curated feed. This feed contains all the official Microsoft and .NET NuGet packages and allows you quickly find our packages.

Previously, this feed was only available in Visual Studio 2013. VS 2012.4 RC brings this feed to Visual Studio 2012 as well.

The “Microsoft and .NET” NuGet feed

Summary

Visual Studio 2012.4 RC 2 includes an updated NuGet client which supports portable class libraries as well as our new curated feed for official Microsoft and .NET NuGet packages.

Please download RC2 and tell us what you think!