title: Content-files with NuGet are very very slow
body: <p>I have a common ASP.NET web application that is shared by multiple sites. I used NuGet to package this common web application and distribute it over the multiple sites. Following this idea: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6816803/#6817690">Multiple ASP.NET web applications depending on a common base application</a>.</p>
  
  <p>By doing this, I end up with some issues. When updating for a new version, NuGet becomes <strong>really slow</strong>. This is because of the 800 content-files it contains.  Somehow NuGet has to take around 1~2 seconds for each content-file it needs to uninstall, ending up with approximately <strong>25 minutes</strong> for uninstall and 5 minutes for install . Especially with a TFS-binding. Looking at the source-code of NuGet I figured that the API of Visual Studio where NuGet is talking to is the bottleneck. Causing <strong>Visual Studio</strong> to peak around <strong>100% of CPU-usage</strong> the whole process.</p>
  
  <p>So I thought, if Visual Studio is that slow, maybe I can do it without it. To my disappointment the NuGet commandline (that runs without Visual Studio) only downloads a package and unzips it. It won't update the project-file due the fact that some Powershell-scripts could reference to the DTE-object... ( although I don't).</p>
  
  <p>Now I'm wondering: what are my options?</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Doing some XML-magic on the project-file to add content-items? What are the drawbacks of doing this? Is there already a tool for this?</li>
  <li>Doing some magic with build scripts?</li>
  <li>Throw away the content-files out of the package and use another tool like Bower or something? How may this be integrated into the project? Because eventually I want to see the content-files I have.</li>
  <li>Not using NuGet at all but something else ...? OpenWrap? Horn? (seems to no longer be active) Or maybe no package manager at all?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Please help me find the best solution :)</p>
  
  <p>.</p>
  
  <p>One other thing that frustrates me is when performing a NuGet update, it does an uninstall followed by an install. Why, if the changes between versions could be minimal?</p>