Nu is a new package management system for .NET which basically wraps RubyGems. I think this is pretty cool and shows some great potential so I decided to give it a try and added gems for Page Type Builder and EPiAbstractions.

Getting Nu

To get started we need to first install Ruby using its very simple installer. Secondly we need to install Nu by typing “gem install nu” into the console (as in the DOS-style command line prompt). Once that’s done we can easily install gems using Nu. All in all the process takes about two minutes on a decent computer with broadband.

Using Nu

To use Nu we change directory to our solution directory and type “nu install <gemname>”. For instance, let’s say that we want to get Page Type Builder to a project located in C:\Projects\SomeProject. We could do that by typing in the following in a console:

That would cause a new folder named “lib” (you can customize the default name) to be created in our solution folder if one didn’t already exist. In it we’d find three folders containing assemblies. One folder for Page Type Builder, and two other folder for Castle.Core and Castle.DynamicProxy2 , both of which are dependencies of Page Type Builder.

OK, so that’s nice but we could just as easily grab Page Type Builder from the it’s CodePlex site, right? We could, but let’s assume that we also wanted NHibernate and Structure Map. Using Nu all we’d have to do is write “nu install nhibernate” and “nu install structuremap” and we’d have the latest versions of those, including their dependencies, in our lib folder.

Learn more about Nu

I’m just playing around with Nu and wanted to post this to let you know that you can use it to get Page Type Builder and EPiAbstractions. To learn more about Nu be sure to visit the Google group and view this video.

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