The NuGet packages.config merger build task automatically merges packages.config files across a folder into one single packages.config file. It doesn't modify or delete any of the packages.config files, it just merges the content of all found packages.config files into one.
Due to modularity our application is split into a lot of single project solution files, which all contain their own list of referenced NuGet packages. This results in round about 385 solutions with a total of 757 packages.config files. Restoring NuGet packages referenced in various different Projects / packages.config files, takes a huge amount of time just for searching & restoring each on their own.
In our case restoring NuGet packages alone took 20 minutes.
So this task retrieves all packages.config located somewhere in the given root directory and merges the content into one single packages.config file. In our case this were 757 packages.config files with a total of 6671 referenced NuGet packages, resulting in a unique amount of 107 packages referenced in one single packages.config.
The result is restoring NuGet packages takes less than 1 minute with the single merged packages.config now.
Install via Visual Studio / Azure DevOps Marketplace @ https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=AlexanderSchmid.packagesconfigmerger