using NuGet with Visual Studio 2005

What would be the most frictionless workflow for working with NuGet and Visual Studio 2005? Is this at all possible? I understand that the plugin is only available for Visual Studio 2010, but there is still the package manager console wich seems to be nothing more than powershell. Can I run the console without Visual Studio and can the console download and integrate packages into visual studio 2005 projects? If so, how is this done?

Scott Hanselman blogged about adding NuGet "support" to Visual Studio 2008. You can probably adapt this slightly to work in Visual Studio 2005 too, though of course you won't get the same experience as in Visual Studio 2010.

Well, not really. A better title would be "How to Cobble Together NuGet Support for Visual Studio 2008 with External Tools and a Prayer." The point is, there are lots of folks using Visual Studio 2008 who would like NuGet support. I'm exploring this area and there's a half-dozen ways to make it happen, some difficult and some less so. The idea would be to enable some things with minimal effort. It'll be interesting to see if there are folks in the community who think this is important enough to actually make it happen. Of course, the easiest thing is to just use 2010 as it sill supports .NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, and 4, but not everyone can upgrade.

Someone could:

Backport the existing NuGet Package References dialog to 2008 using that version's native extensions (not VSiX)

Create MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) plugins for the nuget.exe command-line to update the references in a vbproj or csproj

Use PowerShell scripts and batch files to get the most basic stuff working (get a package and update references.)

Maybe write a shim to get DTE automation working...

But that's coulds and maybes. Let's talk about the MacGyver solution. more »