Compatible versions of Visual Studio projects targeting netstandard nuget packages

[BennieCopeland]

Is there any documentation on which previous versions of Visual Studio solutions/projects can utilize nuget packages targeting only netstandard? By adopting netstandard, are we also dropping support for any Visual Studio version prior to 2015?

[weshaggard]

VS 2015 had some minimal support for .NET Standard projects via the old PCL projects, however the recommended projects are base .NET Core tooling that ships only with VS2017 so yes in order to create .NET Standard libraries it would require VS2017. You will be able to consume one in earlier version of VS but not produce one.

[BennieCopeland]

Thank you. So just to be sure I understand, using Visual Studio 2012 as an example, I can utilize a nuget package that only contains a netstandard library, I just can't create one without using Visual Studio 2017.

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[weshaggard]

For consuming the a nuget package that contains a netstandard library all you need is the updated nuget client. I believe the nuget team is still actively maintaining the nuget client down to VS2013. However you could always run the nuget restore from the command line with the latest nuget.exe if necessary as well.

[tmenier]

FWIW: The netstandard moniker was introduced in NuGet 3.4, which shipped with Visual Studio 2015 Update 2. The only available package manager for Visual Studio 2013 supports NuGet 2.12. Hence, you cannot consume netstandard packages via the Package Manager in VS2013 and earlier. (You can, obviously, still use the NuGet CLI tool.)

[weshaggard]

@emgarten can correct me if I'm wrong but I though the older nuget version also nows about netstandard.

[emgarten]

NuGet 2.12 has netstandard support. You can find it here: http://dist.nuget.org/

[tmenier]

Ah, my mistake.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/release-notes/nuget-2.12

Thanks for clarifying!