The NuGet can be used to find and install packages, that is, software pieces and assemblies and things that we want to use in our project.

The NuGet is not a tool that is specific to ASP.NET MVC projects. It is a tool that we can use inside of Visual Studio for console applications, WPF applications, Azure applications, and other types of applications.

Package Management

The NuGet is a package manager, and is responsible for downloading, installing, updating, and configuring software in our system from the term software we don’t mean end users software like Microsoft Word or Notepad 2, etc. but pieces of software, which we want to use in our project, assembly references.

If for example, assemblies we want to use might be mock, for mock object unit testing, or NHibernate for data access, and components we use when building our application. All the above-mentioned components are open source software, but some NuGet packages we find are closed source software and some of the packages we will find are even produced by Microsoft.

Now the common theme along all the packages mentioned above, like mock and NHibernate, and Microsoft packages like a preview for the Entity Framework, is that they don't come with Visual Studio by default.

Without NuGet

Now to install any of these components without NuGet, we will need the following steps.

If we want to use one of those components, we need to find the home page for some particular project and look for a download link and once the project is downloaded, it's typically in a ZIP format so we will need to extract it.

If we didn't download binaries, then we will first need to build the software and then reference it in our project and many components at that point still require some configuration to get up and running.