Programming ASP.NET MVC 4

Appendix B. Leveraging NuGet as a Platform

Chapter 1 introduced the NuGet package management tool, which helps you install, configure, and maintain your application’s various dependencies, and other chapters throughout the book showed a handful of examples of consuming packages published and maintained by Microsoft and the community at large. However, you don’t have to limit yourself to packages that other people have published.

This appendix will provide a brief introduction to creating your own packages and an overview of what, exactly, a NuGet package really is. Once you have the basics down, you’ll find some NuGet tips and tricks that may help make development more enjoyable for you and your team.

Note

The goal of this appendix is not to teach you everything there is to know about NuGet—NuGet’s own documentation is far too good to compete with! Instead, this appendix briefly shows the fundamentals of using NuGet as a tool, then quickly moves on to showing how you and your team can leverage NuGet as a platform.

Installing the NuGet Command-Line Tool

Though the ASP.NET MVC installation package installs the NuGet Package Manager to consume NuGet packages in your projects, in order to create and distribute your own packages you’ll first need to download the NuGet command-line tool from the NuGet CodePlex site.

Look for the download called “NuGet Command Line Bootstrapper” in the Downloads section of the NuGet CodePlex site, then download and execute it. This initial download is actually ...