As I am finishing up the last week of a shortened (by accepting another position) three month contract position I had run into several issues with the referencing of third party controls (and even a couple Microsoft libraries) and even though the current place is targeting .Net 2.0 for their in house development, the work is being done in Visual Studio 2010, so I kept playing with NuGet packages and new technologies when creating support projects to aid in data loading and setup.

What does all this buildup explanation lead to?

Well as I thinking one day there had to be a better way I saw a tweet from @shanselman about NuGet Package of the Week, and that made the connection, and I thought :

The third party control manufacturers should create a directory on the user’s computer (or network location) and place NuGet packages in there for the various controls that are in the library.

I tweeted about it

and didn’t really get any responses to it. So I sent Scott Hanselman an email asking what he thought of the tweet and he agreed with it and even added something even better, I hadn’t thought of yet. That was that they should add their FREE controls to the NuGet.org site so they are easily discoverable.

So why am I writing this post? I wanted to write it to try to give the idea a little more presence and hopefully it get discovered by the control makers and they think about implementing the idea.

What you can do? If you agree with this idea please talk about it in a blog post and/or tweet the link and lets try to get the idea growing.