There is a major difference between NuGet and Bower. NuGet, as the package manager used to control .NET libraries, cannot deal with static frontend libraries, such as Bootstrap or Tether. However, when working on .NET Core web applications, we need to include these libraries. That is where Bower comes into play, and it is the reason why we had to use Bower in our previous recipes, when we set up our simple app.
In other chapters of this book, we used to install Bower using Node Package Manager (NPM). In this recipe, we will let Visual Studio manage Bower for us, as it comes preinstalled with .NET Core and can be accessed via the Manage Bower Packages command. However, contrary to the previous chapters, in this chapter we will also use the bower.json file, which is used to list dependencies we use in our project. The way that bower.json file works is quite similar to the way that the package.json file is used by Grunt--it simply...