ASP.NET 5: Managing dependencies using the project.json file
In ASP.NET 5 your dependencies, configurations aren’t configured in the .csproj file like before. They added a project.json file where all this is done. This file is a simple JSON file that is much more readable than the .csproj file.
Adding Dependencies
Dependencies are defined using a name and version.
And Visual Studio provides full intellisense to add dependencies.
You can use wildcard to get latest version of a specific set.
If you always want the latest version, you’ll need to specify an empty string.
Resolving dependencies in runtime
When the runtime need to resolve a dependency, there is a chain of loaders the runtime uses to decide what it needs to load. Their will be a loader that will look for a Nuget Package, another will look for a project and another will look for assemblies on the disk. The main goal was to make Nuget packages the primary goal of reference. If you add Nuget Packages as a reference, ASP.NET will fetch those packages when you first deploy and run your application.