Benefits of running your own custom NuGet distribution point and the strategic use of your own packages

For a large number of Visual Studio developers, I'd dare say NuGet is still somewhat an unknown territory. Of course, you can still develop great applications without NuGet packages, but then again, the latest version of Visual Studio makes it almost trivial to use NuGet, both visually and from the command line.

Now, based on my experiences I believe NuGet users could be divided roughly in three groups: casual "opportunistic" users, tactical users and strategic company-wide users. When traveling around companies using Visual Studio and talking to developers especially in the Nordic countries, I've found that these three categories would hold pretty well.

Casual and power usage aside, I believe that in especially mid-sized development companies, the strategic use of NuGet packages might save a lot of time and hassle, and thus improve productivity. Using NuGet would solve many common larger teams are facing: how to make sure everybody is using the latest version, while keeping it possible to maintain older application versions, and efficiently sharing an ever-growing set of custom-built packages without the hassle of installing the manually.

In case you are interested, start for example by reading how to host your own NuGet feeds.

Good luck!