Prevent needing to add NuGet.exe to source control

Question

Some context:
I've followed the tutorial on using NuGet without committing packages with some success. After working around this NuGet issue by manually adding <RestorePackages> and a <Import ...> for the nuget.targets file things were working.

However, once I cloned the repository with Mercurial, I got the following error when building:

Unable to locate 'C:\...\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\MyProject\.nuget\nuget.exe'

This makes sense, because my ignore pattern prevented me from checking in the exe file. From this related SO question I inferred that it's not uncommon to have this file in version control (or is it?), but really I'd prefer not to commit NuGet.exe to version control if I can help it.

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Question: Is there a convenient way to prevent needing to check in NuGet.exe?

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I've tried some Google-fu, skimming the documentation, and fiddling with the NuGet.targets file, no luck so far. It seems preferable if I could just dynamically point to the NuGet.exe of the particular environment that's building the solution.

I know I could just add the exe file, but I'd prefer to know if there are other ways to handle this or know why there are no viable alternatives.

Update:
The nuget.targets file holds some relevant xml:

<!-- only (relevant) parts of the xml shown below --> <DownloadNuGetExe Condition=" '$(DownloadNuGetExe)' == '' ">false</DownloadNuGetExe> ... <UsingTask TaskName="DownloadNuGet" TaskFactory="CodeTaskFactory" AssemblyFile="$(MSBuildToolsPath)\Microsoft.Build.Tasks.v4.0.dll">     <Task>         <Code Type="Fragment" Language="cs">         <![CDATA[         try {             OutputFilename = Path.GetFullPath(OutputFilename);              Log.LogMessage("Downloading latest version of NuGet.exe...");             WebClient webClient = new WebClient();             webClient.DownloadFile("https://nuget.org/nuget.exe", OutputFilename);              return true;         }         catch (Exception ex) {             Log.LogErrorFromException(ex);             return false;         }         ]]>         </Code>     </task> </UsingTask> 

I'm unfamiliar with the workings of .targets files, but this seems to be along the lines of what I'm looking for. With my cowboy-coding hat on I tried changing the false to true in the DownloadNuGetExe element, but this didn't work as expected (with or without the condition attribute).

Answer 1

Just checked: nuget.targets is an msbuild file. And you were on the right way, in:

<DownloadNuGetExe Condition=" '$(DownloadNuGetExe)' == '' ">false</DownloadNuGetExe> 

Change the value to true:

<DownloadNuGetExe Condition=" '$(DownloadNuGetExe)' == '' ">true</DownloadNuGetExe> 

But you must restart Visual Studio or reload the solution (see comments) after this to take effect.