Here, at eXtremeCRM 2015 Madrid, my good friend Gustaf (not V) Westerlund and I had a privilege of delivering a session with a gloomy name Seven Deadly Sins of CRM Development. That’s right, doom and gloom, and Spießrutenlaufen, all over again. I will come back to the topic in the future but for now I want to talk about one of the demos we run during the presentation.

I opted for an easy way out – walk through The Curse of The Browse Button and be done with illustrating the point. I’m glad I asked though how many people actually use NuGet in their development, because the entire room shot up. Oops, here goes my demo. To save the face I probed the subject of how many people use chocolatey and, lucky me, only one hand showed up.

What is it, you may ask? In a nutshell, it’s a silent command line package installer for Windows, based on NuGet. Why bother using command line to install something that you can do by pointing and clicking? Because it works and it makes you productive.

Want to install .net 4.5.2 developer pack to be able to use latest CRM SDK assemblies? Search for the pack on the internets, download, extract, run the installer, answer wizards questions and watch the paint dry. Or:

• Open elevated command or Powershell prompt
• Type clist netfx-4.5.2-devpack, press Enter

Not so long ago I had to reset my Surface and all my beloved programs were removed leaving me with the barebone Windows. Since every now and then I get the list of the installed packages by running clist -localonly, and save the result to to OneDrive, restoring all of them in one go was a breeze.

If you want something more versatile than that to manage repeatable environment builds, have a look at the Boxstarter.

Demo saved, productivity is up, mouse is taking a break.