Think of Chocolatey as a nuget repository with software to install on Windows. Or apt-get for Windows. I’ve tested it for Particular software.

Installation

This is simple, just past one line in a command box and wait for it to finish.

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command 
"iex ((new-object net.webclient)
.DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" 
&& SET PATH=%PATH%;%systemdrive%\chocolatey\bin

Packages

When writing this post the packages feed contains 1840 items. You can browse and search for packages you need. Like Visual Studio 2013 Utlimate (not tested).

Usage

To install a package, just open a command box and type “CINT [package]” where package is the installation you want. I’ve installed the Particular packages needed for nServicebus, ServiceControl and ServicePulse. Just type the install commands and wait for the installation to finish.

Make sure to install in the right order: I ran ServiceControl.install before nservicebus.msmq.install and got an exception about missing Msmq. After de-install and install of ServiceControl everything worked.

Impressions

This can be automated which helps taking the sting out of deployment and provisioning environments. We will be using this in future projects.