Update – 2019
NuGet is now part of Visual Studio and some of the information described here does not apply anymore.
NuGet is a package management system for the .NET platform, it is supposed to simplify the process of incorporating third-party libraries into a .NET project during development. Basically, it is a great way to add (and update) oopen-sourcelibraries and the like to your .NET project. The first version of NuGet was released in October 2010 and it was originally named NuPack.
How to get it
NuGet can be installed from here or from Visual Studio’s Extension Manager located under the Tools menu.
The awesomeness of it
Before NuGet, the way we incorporated third-party libraries into our projects was by doing the following:
- Download third-party library (and any dependencies) from the web.
- Unpack them (as many of them come in compressed files) to a folder in our project, I usually create (or created) a folder labeled “lib” and placed all the third-party libraries there.
- Import to the .NET project.
- Make any necessary changes to the config file when needed.
Too much work right? With NuGet, you basically open your project in Visual Studio and type a command in the new Package Manager Console. For example, if you wanted to add NUnit to your project, you’ll type the following command:
Install-Package NUnit
Ricardo Sanchez 