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What is an assembly in .NET, and what does it contain? What is the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), and is it still relevant in modern .NET? How does NuGet resolve version conflicts when two packages depend on different versions of the same transitive dependency? What is strong naming of assemblies, and why is it much less commonly required in modern .NET? How do you create and publish your own NuGet package from a class library project? What is the difference between a NuGet package's dependency group targeting different frameworks, and why do multi-targeted packages need this? What is a NuGet lock file (packages.lock.json), and what problem does it solve for reproducible builds? What are NuGet package sources, and how do you configure a project to pull packages from a private/internal feed alongside NuGet.org? What is Central Package Management (CPM) in NuGet, and how does Directory.Packages.props centralize version control? How does semantic versioning apply to NuGet packages, and what do version range operators like [1.0,2.0) mean?
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What is NuGet, and what problem does it solve for .NET developers?

Beginner

Answer

NuGet is .NET's official package manager, providing a standardized way to discover, install, update, and share reusable libraries (packages) across projects, avoiding the need to manually download DLLs and manage their dependencies and versions by hand. Packages are hosted on NuGet.org (public) or private feeds (Azure Artifacts, GitHub Packages, internal servers) for proprietary code.
dotnet add package Newtonsoft.Json
// Downloads the package and its dependencies, adds a PackageReference to the .csproj
Real-world example Instead of manually copying a JSON serialization DLL and its dependency DLLs into a project folder, a developer runs one `dotnet add package` command that handles downloading, dependency resolution, and project file updates automatically.

Common follow-ups: How does NuGet resolve version conflicts between transitive dependencies?;What's the difference between NuGet.org and a private feed?

.NET CLI SDK & Project Structure (csproj);Assemblies & NuGet
All 15 Assemblies & NuGet questions