There are many package managers for Windows these days. Probably the most popular is Chocolatey. Microsoft has shown examples to get their own stuff installed using Chocolatey in the past. However, there was an interesting package manager that I started using a few months ago called AppGet.

AppGet is a free and open package manager for Windows. It uses a GitHub repository for package manifest files which can be found at https://github.com/appget/appget.packages.

The future of AppGet changed with the announcement of WinGet at Build 2020. WinGet is very similar to AppGet. First, the name is very similar. Sure AppGet was likely a play on NuGet, a package manager for .NET applications. But there’s more. The package manifests for WinGet are stored in a GitHub repository. The CLI contains many of the same features. In fact, Keivan Beigi, the author of AppGet, blogged about the day AppGet died.

For a company who has worked so hard to tout support of several OSS projects and their communities, this seems like a step back in time. It will be interesting to see if this is a new trend or simply a one-off.