Import from package manager

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The Microsoft.Azure.Cosmos library, including all of its previous versions, are hosted on nuget to make it easier to import the library into a .NET application.

Importing a NuGet package

To import a NuGet package into a .NET application, you must use the .NET CLI. The CLI includes a dotnet add command that is used to add a resource to a .NET project. To specifically add a NuGet package, you must do one of the following things:

Import the latest version of the package

Invoke the dotnet add package command with only the name of the package. For example, this command will import the latest stable version of the Microsoft.Azure.Cosmos library.

dotnet add package Microsoft.Azure.Cosmos

Tip

This command will only import stable versions of the package. If a newer preview of the package is available, it will import the older stable version. If no stable version is available, it will not import the package at all.

Import a specific version of the package

Invoke the dotnet add package command with the name of the package and the --version argument specifying a specific package version. For example, this command will import the 3.22.1 version of the Microsoft.Azure.Cosmos library.

dotnet add package Microsoft.Azure.Cosmos \
    --version 3.22.1

Tip

Specifying the package version is the only way to import preview versions of packages that have not been flagged as stable yet.

.NET project file

Once imported, the package specification will be added to the csproj file for the .NET project. The project file uses the XML format and a new element named PackageReference is created within the ItemGroup element with the name of the package and the version. In this example, the 3.22.1 version of the Microsoft.Azure.Cosmos library was imported into the project from NuGet.

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
    <TargetFramework>net6.0</TargetFramework>
  </PropertyGroup>
  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Azure.Cosmos" Version="3.22.1" />
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

Note

The version of the package will be added whether you specfied it in the import command or not. If you did not specify a package version, the version of the latest stable package that was imported is specified in the project file.