With the official release of NuGet and the NuGet gallery, I decided to try it all out by uploading the current versions of WiimoteLib and ThinkGearNET to the gallery.  The process was pretty smooth, but I learned a little bit along the way which I thought I’d share.

So what’s NuGet?
From their own page:  NuGet (formerly known as NuPack) is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development.

In short, this means you can right-click and add a reference to a third party library without having to download it yourself, extract it, locate it manually on your drive, deal with dependencies, etc.  All of this is handled automatically, as is finding and integrating new versions of those libraries with your projects.

NuGet as a User
If you want to use NuGet to download packages, you’ll first need to install the NuGet Package Manager extension for Visual Studio 2010.  You can find this in the Visual Studio Extension Manager or at the NuGet CodePlex site. 

Update: Slides and source for my sessions are posted over on my Events page.  Have a look!  Thanks to everyone that came to my sessions!  Comments and critiques are welcome.

I have been selected to speak at the Visual Studio Live! conference in Orlando.  In addition to presenting two sessions at the conference, I’m also coordinating a special event on Tuesday night which we’re calling Devopalozza.  I have created and will host a team Jeopardy! style game-show which will pit three teams of speakers and attendees against each other for fabulous prizes.  I previously created the hardware and software for the Visual Studio Live Redmond conference, which turned into an article on Coding4Fun for those that might want to create a game-show at home or the office.

The two sessions I’m presenting are:

A new version of TweeVo is finally available.  This version allows the program to work once again now that Twitter has switched over to a mandatory OAuth/xAuth authentication scheme.  Chris Miller deserves all the credit for this one for handling the implementation of the new security scheme with some sample code from Shannon Whitley.  You can find downloads over on the original TweeVo page.  Give it a try and let me know if you run into any issues making it go.  Enjoy!

I released version 1.1 of ThinkGearNET over at CodePlex last week.  ThinkGearNET is a library that allows developers to easily use the Neurosky MindSet device with .NET.  This version now matches Neurosky’s latest SDK and supports eye blink detection.  Nothing else has changed.  If anyone has used a prior version of the library, please give the new version a try and let me know if you have any problems.  Thanks!

Tonight I hosted the Devapalooza event for Visual Studio Live in Redmond.  For the event, we played a Jeopardy-like game using software and hardware I created.  You can find an article on how the software was created, how to build the hardware, and full source/binary downloads over at Coding4Fun and CodePlex  This can be a fun way to host training at your office, or a way to liven up a user group.

A huge thanks to Dan Waters and Clemens Vasters from Microsoft, VSLive speakers Rocky Lhotka, Deborah Kurata, and David Platt, and our three attendees who played the game.  I think it was a great time.  Hopefully you did too if you were in attendance.

After playing the game tonight for real, I have a few ways to fix up the software and make it a bit easier to use, especially on the scoring side.  Also note that the code isn’t the best example of great coding.  With this being a side project and the deadline looming, I took a few dirty shortcuts.  But, it got the job done.  It looks like we might be playing this again at Visual Studio Live Orlando in November, so I should have those changes posted to Coding4Fun/CodePlex before then.