NuGet has been helping .NET developers maintain package dependencies for a number of years now, and any good dev should know the basic operations from within Visual Studio – how to add, update, and remove packages in a solution, using the NuGet Gallery. But to use only the NuGet Gallery is to know only half – or less – of the story. You might be missing out on…

• Testing out pre-release versions of your projects key dependencies.
• Reverting to older versions of libraries.
• Stand-alone tool installations using NuGet.
• Full-fledged Windows installations using Chocolatey.
• Placing your custom packages into private repositories.

Here are a few tips for moving toward mastery of this crucial part of the .NET development ecosystem.