Windows aptitude

If you came from a Linux distro which uses a package manager to install new software (there 're a bunch of them right now) you might find you missing such a feature during your windows usage hours.

When installing new software you can land in the software home page, look for the download link, click it, wait until the download finishes then you 'd see if you just double click the downloaded package or if you need an archive program to "unzip" what you downloaded, and so on... but it seems to be an alternative to this which is similar to the apt-get way of installing things.


NuGet is a package manager targeted to Windows software developers, so the could get the libraries they needed.

If you 're not a developer or you 'd like to install not only development libraries but also every day software (for i.e. Google Chrome or Firefox) then you 'd like to taste Chocolatey.

Chocolatey is a package manager for regular software, you could find Chocolatey's package catalog here, there you 'll find things like Java Runtime, Notepad++, Git, 7Zip, VLC and FileZilla among others. As you could see it catalog is full of open-source, multi-platform software that you would love to use.

Once you got Chocolatey installed using it should be simple, consider installing Mozilla Firefox for example, just invoke the "chocolatey install" command with the package name as parameter and voila:

c:>cinst Firefox

that's it.


Pros:
easy, ready for automation installation of software

Cons:
i couldn't test it fully because it has limited  proxy support. I think NTLM authentication is not working for me. I will test it using CNTLM local proxy later and will share the results.



EDIT ----------------------------------------------------

Finally (see my next post) I could use CNTLM for authenticating with my company's proxy and I 've just installed AdobeAcrobat reader with a single line command, like a charm!