It's official.  NuGet is now my all-time favourite Visual Studio Add-on.

The other day I was trying to upload a simple website to my hosting platform, but was having trouble with the dependencies.  As it happens, the hosting environment doesn't have MVC3 installed, or SqlServer Ce 4 for that matter.  MVC wasn't much of a problem, but the Ce database server on the other hand - well.  That's a different story.

Since the website was very simple in functionality - it provides a form that users can fill out to be notified of developments for a piece of real-estate in Melbourne's Yarra Valley region - and we only had a day to build it, I thought the combination of MVC3 with SqlServer Ce (we used the Code-First data model approach, which worked out really well) would be a no-brainer.

That was until I proceeded to upload the database, and started having to hunt around for all the necessary dll's.  It wasn't enough to just mark the dependencies so they would be copied to the output directory, I actually had to go and manually hunt around for additional dll's as well.

Enter NuGet.

Nuget allows you to download and automatically set up additional packages and libraries with ease.  It takes care of the dependencies, and updates your configuration files as well so you can just start using the new functionality without having to worry about web.config settings, for example.

So.  I added the package for EFCodeFirst.SqlServerCompact to the project, which resulted in all the dependencies being added as well in one easy step, and then all I had to do was make a few tweaks here and there and upload the changes.  Too easy!

Thank you, NuGet, you've just made my life that much easier.