Work without NuGet

Question

I try upgrading my solution to nuget but I have encountered many and many problems in every operation on reference (update many times tends to make it impossible to use some packages and find non way to remove it or make it work, our reverse proxy block some installation, use svn to align the PC development tends to create references to non-existent, install specific version of a library in difficult, and many more)

in short, a disaster compared to the old copy paste of some files made ​​only when I really need to update a library

So I revert all to the old way (manual download of dll) and all work fine except for ajax control toolkit and and postsharp.

There is a way to extract dll from nuget packages to install them with a simply copy/paste?

Answer 1

I have, in the past, created a dummy project just to use NuGet to add the required package containing the specific DLLs I want. Then it exists on my machine and I can copy/paste/whatever the DLL as I see fit into the real project.

Answer 2

The dlls will exist in the packages in the directory of your solution once you have added the package to a project, so you can add them to another project and copy paste from there.

Answer 3

7Zip will open the nugetpackage or just rename the package extension to .zip

Answer 4

Extracting assemblies from NuGet packages to reference them in your projects will not always work correctly for you. Some NuGet packages also run scripts during installation to perform important initialization steps. For example, PostSharp needs to modify your project file to add itself to the build process.

It's better to have this initialization logic automated by the package owner than to perform the steps manually each time. To deal with the package versioning issues, you can download all the required packages and store them in one folder. Then add this folder as a package source in NuGet settings:

Tools -> Library Package Manager -> Package Manager Settings