MIP SDK .NET binaries on NuGet

Article

5 min. read

Hans Kierulff

Developer Advocate

December 03, 2020

On October 5th, we released the XProtect 2020 R2 MIP SDK .NET Framework .dll binaries as NuGet packages!

This means that you can add the needed Milestone XProtect NuGet packages to your Visual Studio projects and let Visual Studio handle the download. The simplest way might be to use the NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio (Project/Manage NuGet Packages), and then browse for the relevant package(s).

All the Milestone XProtect MIP packages have their names prefixed with “MilestoneSystems”, so that’s a good search term to use when browsing for packages in the Visual Studio NuGet Package Manager.

The following NuGet packages are available:

MilestoneSystems.VideoOS.Platform - for plug-in integration development
MilestoneSystems.VideoOS.Platform.SDK - for standalone application development
MilestoneSystems.VideoOS.Platform.SDK.Debug - for debugging standalone application
MilestoneSystems.VideoOS.Platform.AccessControl - for Access Control plug-in development
MilestoneSystems.VideoOS.Platform.Transact - for Transact plug-in development
MilestoneSystems.VideoOS.Platform.DriverFramework - for driver development
MilestoneSystems.VideoOS.ConfigurationAPI - for using Configuration AP

When you add NuGet packages to your Visual Studio Project, Visual Studio will add references to the packages in either of it’s two supported formats: the newer “PackageReference” or “packages.config”. When needed, Visual Studio will download the packages and place their contents in a local folder.

In this SampleDeviceDriver project you can see the:

NuGet Package Manager and the installed DriverFramework package
The packages.config file
The VideoOS.Platform.DriverFramework assembly reference
The project-local \packages\ Path to the referenced assembly

If you want to upgrade an existing project to use the NuGet packages, I find it easiest to:

Delete the existing VideoOS… references
Install the corresponding NuGet packages (Project/Manage NuGet Packages...)
Ensure the needed References are set up
Potentially check
- The packages.config
- the Path property of the VideoOS… references

Resources

Also check out the DevCon2020 recording Milestone Developer Conference 2020 - MIP Samples on GitHub and .NET binaries as NuGet packages - YouTube

The NuGet packages distributed by Milestone can be found here: https://www.nuget.org/profiles/milestonesys, where you also can download them manually from.

Milestone plans to release packages to NuGet in the same cadence as XProtect is released or, when updates are available.

If you only need to get the .NET Framework binaries, you don’t need to run the MIP SDK Installer (downloaded from Milestone Sys). However, there are still items that are only available through the installers, so we also plan to release these on distribution platforms relevant for the various content. Next up, we’re planning to release the MIP samples on GitHub. More on that later!