Package validation

Package validation tooling allows you, as a library developer, to validate that your packages are consistent and well formed. It provides the following checks:

• Validates that there are no breaking changes across versions.
• Validates that the package has the same set of public APIs for all the different runtime-specific implementations.
• Catches any applicability holes.

You can run package validation either as an MSBuild task or using the Microsoft.DotNet.ApiCompat.Tool global tool. If your app isn't packable, use assembly validation instead.

You enable package validation in your .NET project by setting the EnablePackageValidation property to true.

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">

  <PropertyGroup>
    <TargetFrameworks>netstandard2.0;net6.0</TargetFrameworks>
    <EnablePackageValidation>true</EnablePackageValidation>
  </PropertyGroup>

</Project>

EnablePackageValidation runs a series of checks after the Pack task. There are some additional checks that can be run by setting other MSBuild properties. For more information, see Package validation properties.

There are three different validators that verify your package as part of the Pack task:

• The Baseline version validator validates your library project against a previously released, stable version of your package.
• The Compatible runtime validator validates that your runtime-specific implementation assemblies are compatible with each other and with the compile-time assemblies.
• The Compatible framework validator validates that code compiled against one framework can run against all the others in a multi-targeting package.

For information about suppressing compatibility warnings, see How to suppress.