Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Using NuGet with LinqPad for free

Recently LinqPad got a great integration with NuGet in the paid version of the software

Unfortunately for the user of the free version it is a bit more difficult to use NuGet but it's not impossible.

Today I'm going to show you a way to use NuGet to get libraries into your LinqPad queries.

NuGet Package Explorer


You can download the NuGet Package Explorer from CodePlex

The primary use for this tool is to explorer, edit and publish NuGet packages. You could also use this tool to extract the files contained in the packages and put them in a folder, and that's what we'll do now.

First we need to Open a package from online feed


Here we could query for the package we want.


Select a package and click OK. We can now take a peek inside the package if we want. For us, we want to Export the content from the File menu.


You need choose a folder where to export the files of the package. Finally, in LinqPad we need to add a reference to the DLL by going in the Query Properties (F4) and clicking Browse. After that we are ready to start writing our queries.

Using the NuGet local cache folder


One another tip I've got for you is to add the local NuGet cache folder to the list of online feed as a shortcut for when we want to access a package we previously downloaded with the NuGet Package Explorer or even Visual Studio.

First, from the Tools menu select View NuGet download cache.


This will open a Windows Explorer on the folder %AppData%\Local\NuGet\Cache.


Now copy this path, go back to NuGet Package Explorer and Open a package from online feed. Then paste the path into Package source field and click Reload.


From now on you will be able to choose between the official NuGet.org feed and your local cache when you want to open NuGet packages.

NuGet.exe


Of course for the hardcore user of the command line interface one could use nuget.exe directly to download and extract the files rather than using the Package Explorer. I'm definitely not that hardcore. :-)

NuGet.exe is also available from the CodePlex site.