---
layout:     post
title:      "Day 6"
subtitle:   "1.0.0-alpha.1"
date:       2014-12-30 11:59:59
author:     "Robert Rouhani"
header-img: "img/bg/day6.png"
---

It took almost my entire day, but I revamped a lot of the structure around
SharpNav and released version 1.0.0-alpha.1! Since it's already so late, this
post is going to be a really short one as I want to go to bed right now.

NuGet won't support Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 until Nuget 3.0, which should be
released in the coming weeks, so on NuGet this version appears as 1.0.0-alpha.

![NuGet Release](/img/post/day6/nuget.png)

I removed as many of the commited binaries in the repository as I could,
relying on NuGet to download dependencies. SharpNav.Examples still needs to
be converted, but seeing as the only dependency is on OpenTK (which I have
installed in the GAC on my machine), it should be fine until I fix it
tomorrow.

Switching to NuGet also broke my Travis CI builds and sent me an email per
commit following the change. This is something I'll fix tomorrow, I've already
tested everything to work locally (and ran my limited number of unit tests).

C#'s built-in `Version` class describes an assembly version with 4 integers,
Major.Minor.Revision.Build. This isn't quite the same as SemVer, but can
easily be mapped onto it. Major, Minor, and Revision stay the same (though
Revision is called Patch in SemVer), and the Build number becomes a special
number that keeps track of pre-releases. I arbitrarily chose the following
ranges for 'Build' numbers:

  - 0 <= alpha < 100
  - 100 <= beta/rc < 200
  - 200 = final release

I chose this instead of incrementing by one whenever any pre-release was
made because this way a consumer of the C# version number can still
programmatically differentiate alpha, beta, and final releases. I doubt very
many people are going to actually use this, but it's important that I
differentiate versions with the C# version number because of how C# references
assemblies with a 'Fully Qualified Name' that includes the assembly name,
version, culture, a strong-name key token. NuGet may support SemVer, but the
GAC doesn't.

On that note, I also did some work to ensure installing SharpNav to the GAC
would work properly given the different integrations I have. Each integrated
version gets signed by a unique [strong-name key][1], that way the assembly's
[Fully Qualified Name][2] differs by it's `PublicKeyToken`. Since the GAC
stores assemblies by their Fully Qualified Name, it's safe to install multiple
copies of SharpNav.dll to the GAC and have them exist side-by-side. The way
this all works is pretty cool, I'd recommend reading into it if you've got
some spare time.

That's all I'm going to say about it for the time being. I spent most of today
researching all of these things as well as figuring out the nuances of MSBuild
to get my special multi-configuration projects working. I could easily write a
post twice as long as this just on NuGet and how it used to suck pretty hard,
still sucks a little bit, and probably won't suck that much in a year or two.
It's around 4:30am my time, so I think some sleep is in order.


[1]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/xwb8f617.aspx
[2]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/k8xx4k69.aspx