When I work on personal projects I realise time is a very sacred thing indeed. With only a few hours here and there it is important to be as productive as possible and squeeze value out of every minute. Plus for a personal project I want to enjoy coding not endure it.

With that in mind, I try to find (and recommend) decent, robust, proven community code to use in my projects to save tonnes of time. Once you start using these tools I promise you won’t be able to live without them. Hmm.. well only if you care about the quality of your product AND the value of your time that is.

As well as 7 great tools I’ve also included one tool that I didn’t like. I say that with a lot of respect for the tool and the company that produced it, but in practice it was just easier not to use it. More on that later.

Nuget

This is the daddy on of all of these 7 tools because Nuget makes it simple for you to get the other tools installed in your solution.

You may already have this installed in Visual Studio (depending on the where, when, what and who of your install) and it has the generic and official sounding name of “Library Package Manager” within the Tools menu:

If not you can add it using the Extension Manager. Search for “Nuget”.

What is Nuget?

Nuget is a tool that will download, install and reference dependencies you need for your projects. Like NUnit for example.

It makes the process fun and simple.

Here are the main benefits of using Nuget for referencing libraries that others have built on the net:

• 1000′s of packages exist – All projects worth their salt will have a Nuget package, so you will find what you want quickly and painlessly.
• It automatically installs dependencies.
• It organises the dlls and other stuff nicely on your disk for you.
• It will create the reference for you.
• You can mandate a version or get the latest.
• Creating your own Nuget packages is effortless.
• It is easy to uninstall a Nuget package you no longer need. This encourages experimentation.
• Nuget can be used for more than class library references. Other applications include application and website deployment.

Next…

This post is part of a series. In my next post I will talk about ApprovalTests.