Well, what do you know. It seems like NuGet’s been to the hairdresser recently.  In fact, in Visual Studio 2015 you’ll find the preview of NuGet 3.0, which looks like this:

It’s obviously changed quite a bit from the version we use today, which for the sake of comparison is this:

The most obvious thing to notice is that NuGet is now a first-class citizen with its own page in Visual Studio, rather than being a little modal window. There are other layout improvements you’ll notice, such as the fact that they’ve done away with the separation between installed, installable and updatable packages. In fact, the new NuGet experience is a unified one in which you can filter the packages you want to see: All, Installed, or Update Available.

Usability is not all that is being improved in NuGet 3.0. In fact, there are a bunch of new features that weren’t in NuGet before. One that I am very happy to see is the ability to select the package version to install, rather than having to resort to the Package Manager Console to install specific versions.

Another really cool feature is that of package consolidation. Have you ever had something like 4 different versions of JSON.NET across your solution, and then had to painfully manually converge them into a single version? NuGet 3 allows you to consolidate different versions of the same assembly pretty easily. Just select the version you want, and select the “Consolidate” action, and click the “Consolidate” button:

There are also a few other features, such as a Preview button showing what actions will be taken when you execute a change, and a couple of advanced options. For full details on what’s new, check out the official announcement.

Oh, and just in case you’re curious… that funny thingy next to the Search box that looks like a ship’s wheel is actually supposed to be a gear icon, because it takes you into the NuGet settings.