Appendix B. NuGet basics
Because I use NuGet for all the demos and examples in this book, I thought it would be a good idea to go over the basics of NuGet for those who aren’t familiar with it. NuGet is a tool that has fundamentally changed the way I install, update, and use third-party libraries when writing .NET projects. It’s become one of those “how did I ever get anything done without it?” tools.
In this appendix I’ll show you how to install NuGet (if you are using Visual Studio 2012, then you already have it installed). Then I’ll show you how to use it to install packages, then how package restore works. I’m not going to attempt to document every feature of NuGet—just enough to get by in this book. Comprehensive NuGet documentation (including how to build your own packages and how to run private NuGet servers) is available at NuGet.org.
NuGet is an open source package manager for .NET that used to be known as NuPack. NuGet was created by a team at Microsoft and was contributed to the Outercurve Foundation. It has become the de facto package manager tool for .NET and is currently integrated with Visual Studio 2012.