OK, the name isn’t amazing, but having lived in linux land for a while now, and on mac too, the one thing I miss in windows is a no-hassle, dialog-free installation experience, that I can just do using a command line.

Chocolatey is as close as it gets, and it makes for a very good experience.

Just go to http://chocolatey.org/ and check out the simple instructions.

after a simple install you should be able to install a bunch of apps very easily without having to :

 

• go to a site
• download an installer
• unzip maybe
• run installer
• press all the dialogs

 

you would just do a simple command line “c:\cinst [[application name]]”

and that’s it. here’s the list of things you can install now, and you can quite easily create more.

I think it should be awesome to bae able to install typemock isolator that way (hint!) but I don’t work there anymore, so I can’t make it happen. If I did, I would.

I hope that people will start using this for automated software deployments too.