NuGet In-House Succinctly

What is NuGet?

NuGet is an open-source package manager developed by the Microsoft .NET Foundation for the Microsoft development platform. The first release of NuGet, called NuPack, appeared in October of 2010. Since then, it has evolved into a great ecosystem of services and tools. NuGet is free and licensed under the Apache License 2.0, and comes preinstalled with Visual Studio 2012 and later.

NuGet is primarily a tool for sharing .NET code in the form of packages. It defines a way to create, host, and consume these packages. It also provides the tools required for each one of the roles involved in code sharing: creators, hosts, and consumers

The NuGet package

A NuGet package consists of .NET code compiled as one or several assemblies, delivered in a single compressed file with a .nupkg extension. Essentially, a .nupkg file is a .zip file with a different extension. Therefore, if we want to browse the content of a NuGet package, we can use any of the .zip file browser tools that exist on the market. One of the topics of this book is creating NuGet packages for sharing our code. This will be explained later.