According to the NuGet’s official page,

NuGet is a Visual Studio 2010 extension that makes it easy to add, remove, and update libraries and tools in Visual Studio projects that use the .NET Framework.

In detail, Nuget is a free, open-source package management system offered by the Microsoft ASP.Net team to the developer community to ease the process of integrating any 3^rd party open source component into our project.

There are large numbers of free, open source re-usable components available around the web which can be re-used in our projects. For example jQuery, log4net, ELMAH, NInject, Structure Map are few to note. If you notice, every time when we want to integrate these components into our project we will spend some considerable amount of time in downloading it, integrating it and configuring it. Since this is a repeatable task with a scope for automating it, Microsoft introduced a new add-on for Visual Studio called NuGet which can find all the available OSS(Open-Source System) components and integrate it in into our project with their dependent components. NuGet also takes care updating the config file if the component requires adding some settings in project config file. It also provides option to update the component and remove the component if required.

Once installed, this add-in gives both GUI based and PowerShell based consoles to find and add components into our project solution. NuGet once loaded will load all the available components (Packages in NuGet terms) from a centralised feed location and will give an option to download and integrate it in our projects. For every component, a package is created and is added with centralised feed system which is then consumed by the NuGet to fetch the available components. With NuGet, you can also create a package of your component and add it to the centralised feed for others to consume thro’ NuGet.

Installing NuGet

You can install the NuGet from the official page at codeplex. The current version is 1.1 as of this writing. Currently, Nuget supports visual studio 2010(also developer edition) in the below platforms.

1.      Windows 7

2.      Windows Vista SP1

3.      Windows Server 2008

4.      Windows Server 2008 R2

5.      Windows Server 2003 SP2

6.      Windows XP SP3

You can install the Nuget through the Extension Manager in Visual Studio 2010. Next section will guide you to do that.

Steps

1.      Open Visual Studio 2010.

2.      Go to Tools> Extension Manager.

3.      Extension Manager dialog will load all installed extensions installed in Visual Studio 2010. See the below figure. If the NuGet is already installed, it will be listed here.

4.      Click “Online Gallery” tab in the above console. This will load all the available extensions for the visual studio. Once loaded, you can find the “Nuget Package Manager” add-in. Click Download button to download and install. Alternatively, you can type Nuget in the search textbox to load only Nuget from Online Gallery.

5.      After downloading, the setup will begin automatically. Refer below. Click Install.

6.      Click Close once you get the below screen.

In next section, we will see how to use NuGet to find and integrate some 3^rd party library using the GUI and PowerShell commands.

Adding Libraries Using NuGet GUI

On successful installation of NuGet, you can see the NuGet option in Tools> Library Package Manager. See the image below.

Select “Add Library Package Reference..”. This will bring the NuGet GUI as below. The Installed Packages tab will show if there are any library(or Package) already added through NuGet in your project.

Note

I have installed log4net already in the project; hence you can see it in Installed Packages tab.

To add a new package, select Online tab. This will load all the available packages in the central feed. You can select a library and click Install to install the package into the project.

Alternatively, you can search a particular package in search textbox in to right corner. For example, type NHibernate in search textbox and click enter. It will display the package with install option. Refer below,

On clicking install, it will install the package like below.

 Once the selected package is installed, you can see the selected package’s dll into bin(or in References in solution explorer), dependant assemblies if any and configuration settings in config file if any.

Alternatively, you can also use PowerShell commands to find and add assemblies like above. Next section will help you to do the same.

To open the NuGet PowerShell Console, Go to Tools > Library Package Manager > Click “Package Manager Console”.

This will load the PowerShell console where you can use commands to add or remove packages. Type the below command to get all the available commands for NuGet.

get-help NuGet

This will load all the available commands that supports Nuget. See below,

Get-Package                                      

Gets the set of packages available from the package source.

Install-Package                                 

Installs a package and its dependencies into the project.

Uninstall-Package                 

Uninstalls a package. If other packages depend on this package, the command will fail unless the –Force option is specified.

Update-Package                                

Updates a package and its dependencies to a newer version.

New-Package                                    

Creates a new package when supplied with a Nuspec package specification file.

Add-BindingRedirect             

Examines all assemblies within the output path for a project and adds binding redirects to the application (or web) configuration file where necessary.

Get-Project                                        

Returns a reference to the DTE (Development Tools Environment) for the active or specified project.

To Get all the available packages

Get-Package –Remote

To Install a Package

Install-Package packagename

EX

Install-Package NUnit

To Uninstall a package

Uninstall-Package NUnit

Once installed, you will see all the related dll’s and config(if any) in your project solution.