NuGet was a great idea and addition to Visual Studio.  That said, it can be a notorious pain in the ‘you know where’.  Things like not being able to see packages, not being able to download new packages, InvalidOperationExceptions in the PowerShell window when working with NuGet packages are just a few of the problems you can (and probably will) run into when working with NuGet. 

I picked up a new laptop and installed VS 2010 Ultimate and crated a new MVC3 application project.  I wanted to use Ninject and opened the “Add Library Package Reference” and was greeted with this error:

There was an error while processing the request. Please verify that ‘http://packages.nuget.org/v1/FeedService.svc/’ is a valid feed.

I verified the settings in the Package Manager Settings and even changed the redirect to point to the Feed Service directly with no effect.  I also applied the recommended VS hotfix that was posted as a way to resolve the problem and that had no effect either.

I was able to manually force adding Ninject by going to the Package Manager Console (PowerShell) and doing the following command:

Install-Package Ninject.MVC3

But I’m the curious type so I couldn’t just let it go at that.  After some web surfing, I came across a tip to uninstall NuGet from VS (running as Admin) and then installing it directly from the CodePlex web site.   Bingo!  That did it!

This solution does point to some disparity between the Visual Studio install team and the Open Source community.  I hope this post helps someone else avoid wasting time searching.

Happy Coding!