Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
NuGet is a really useful tool for managing external references for your .Net projects. It's also a tool that the Sitecore community are making good use of, with loads of useful Sitecore extensions available as packages. Plus it's been extended with the ability to deploy things into a Sitecore instance. Another potential use in Sitecore projects (that I've not found much discussion of) is for your references to the Sitecore DLLs themselves. I've been experimenting with this on some of my projects, so thought I'd write down what I've tried.
A neat little trick I discovered recently, and promptly forgot to share is that you can make use of Visual Studio's diff window for any pair of files, without the need for a project or solution. All you need is a little command line trickery.
Recently I attended the developer upgrade training course for Sitecore 7, which was an interesting (and busy!) day learning about what's been changing in Sitecore in recent releases. But in amongst all that information, there was an interesting admission – Sitecore's training has moved away from the "stick your Visual Studio Solution in the Sitecore website folder" model that had jarred with me when I first did their training.
I didn't really like this model when it was taught at the original Sitecore training I attended a few years back. Before Sitecore I had done all my development work with my solution folders outside of the IIS sites. So the model I adopted for development when I started my first real project made use of MSBuild instead. (Rather than the Visual Studio Publishing wizard that the latest training discusses) So I thought I'd write down a few of the things I'd tried for setting up solutions, in case these of use to anyone else...
