In my last post, A world of debuggable open-source software – Part 2: Plugins, I used NuGet Package Explorer as an example of an application that uses NuGet-based plugins, and how that makes it very easy to publish their symbols and sources to SymbolSource, for a great debugging experience in case anything goes wrong at runtime. If you’re interested in creating your own plugin system based on NuGet, have a look at this post by Aaron Powell: Creating a NuGet-based plugin engine.

I also mentioned in that post that you can push any PDB files and sources to SymbolSource, including those of entire applications. Because NuGet is still the easiest way of pushing symbol packages, what we would need is a NuGet-based method of distributing programs. Fortunately such tool exists already and is called Chocolatey. If you haven’t heard of it before, here’s how it’s described by its authors:

Chocolatey NuGet is a Machine Package Manager, somewhat like apt-get, but built with windows in mind.

In this post I will show you how Chocolatey and SymbolSource can be used to publish open-source applications with full debugging support, allowing users with programming skills to analyze problems through code and provide much more useful bug reports. Or even patches and pull requests!
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