Why does ASP.NET MVC 4 have so many NuGet packages and which are truly important?

Question

As the title says, why do the ASP.NET MVC 4 projects have soooo many NuGet packages? Is the entire framework split into packages now? Which ones are truly important for an empty project that will be a website, no API, etc?

UPDATE

To clarify, I'm not having issue, well, unless you count basic confusion as one. I just want to know why new MVC 4 projects have so many packages installed by default? An empty project has one full page of packages. An internet project has three full pages of packages.

I'm just curious why this is because my current MVC 3 projects use at max five packages.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11996173/why-does-asp-net-mvc-4-have-so-many-nuget-packages-and-which-are-truly-important

Answer 1

As the title says, why do the ASP.NET MVC 4 projects have soooo many NuGet packages?

That's a question you need to ask the designers of the framework.

Which ones are truly important for an empty project that will be a website, no API, etc?

Here's the strict minimum that will allow you to configure routing and define a controller with an action rendering a Razor view:

<packages>
  <package id="Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc" version="4.0.20710.0" targetFramework="net40" />
  <package id="Microsoft.AspNet.Razor" version="2.0.20710.0" targetFramework="net40" />
  <package id="Microsoft.AspNet.WebPages" version="2.0.20710.0" targetFramework="net40" />
  <package id="Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure" version="1.0.0.0" targetFramework="net40" />
</packages>

or if you prefer only 1/2 of a page: