tl;dr Summary

NuGet (the .NET package manager) has taken over in ASP.NET MVC 5, and that’s a good thing. The bad old days of manually managing DLLs are gone! Like a military coup overthrowing an oppressive dictatorship, we can hope that the new, oppressive NuGet dictatorship is better.

There’s not much meat to this post, so you might as well finish reading.

NuGet in ASP.NET

Here’s what I got when creating a new project with the VS 2013 Preview (note this is the Preview, not the RC or the RTM version)

Assuming your projects don’t use NuGet at all, this pile of packages might appear daunting. But no worries! What’s great about source control is that it allows me to commit everything to a safe, remote location, which then allows me to don a hockey mask and rev up the chainsaw, and go to work in the NuGet package manager.

I feel like maybe I should write more, but it’s the year 2013 and I don’t feel like writing an introduction to package managers or why they’d be useful. So, package managers are useful and have their own problems, discover why. Q.E.D.

In summary, I like how NuGet has become the standard for new ASP.NET MVC projects, as it’s one better default and one less thing to think about.