NuGet became an essential part of the development for .NET platform over the recent years, as it provided the convenience of creating and consuming the packages.

The packages are easy to discover and use with the help of Package Manager UI in Visual Studio. In reality, adding a package reference to a project often comes down to a single line:

<Project>  
  ...
  <ItemGroup>
    <!-- The line below adds Contoso.HelpfulLibrary NuGet package to the project -->
    <PackageReference Include="Contoso.HelpfulLibrary" Version="1.3.0" />
  </ItemGroup>
  ...
</Project>  

Once the package reference is in place, Contoso.HelpfulLibrary can be used by the code.

NuGet does all the heavy lifting. It automatically downloads the package (if it is not downloaded yet), adds an assembly reference to the project, copies required package files at the build time and so on.

Development tends to be much easier with NuGet. And even more so since it also allows to consume tools.

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