NuGet Package Icons

Question

I've switched to .NET Core in my development and I noticed that in some cases the .NET Core package seems to use the blue icon. Also, some packages seem to work on .NET Core projects as well even though they have the standard .NET icon -- see below.

Do these icons mean anything?

Answer 1

Do these icons mean anything?

It depends on whether the author of the package want to specially assigned an icon to the package to identify the package.

Generally, we use a URL for a 64x64 image with transparency background to use as the icon for the package in the option iconUrl property- See the NuSpec Reference. If we do not specify this option, NuGet will use the default blue icon. We can use .NET icon to specify that this is a .net standard package. Of course, we can use more meaningful icons to specify our packages. So we saw the icons of these packages：

Besides, .NET Standard solves the code sharing problem for .NET developers across all platforms by bringing all APIs that you expect and love across the environments that you need. So you can install some packages on .NET Core projects, even though they have the standard .NET icon.