"PackageReference" Adoption

[QilongTang]

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Purpose

This is magic, makes the project config so much easier to read! And verified project still builds fine locally with local cache of all the dependecies. We should totally do this.

Notice there is way to migrate legacy packages.config in Visual Studio 2017 and can be opened correctly in VS2017 only according to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/reference/migrate-packages-config-to-package-reference#limitations.

A team decision we need to make!

Declarations

Check these if you believe they are true

• The code base is in a better state after this PR
• Is documented according to the standards
• The level of testing this PR includes is appropriate
• User facing strings, if any, are extracted into *.resx files
• All tests pass using the self-service CI.
• Snapshot of UI changes, if any.
• Changes to the API follow Semantic Versioning, and are documented in the API Changes document.

Reviewers

@mjkkirschner @scottmitchell

FYIs

@DynamoDS/dynamo

[QilongTang]

My only concern is how it is going to affect our CI. If all machines are updated with VS2017, we should be fine though but how about 3rd party developers?

[mjkkirschner]

@QilongTang thanks for checking this out... this warning kind of scares me:
Some packages may not be fully compatible with PackageReference..... is there a big benefit to doing this now? It's also unsupported by c++projects it seems.

[mjkkirschner]

@QilongTang I believe we will also hit there in some of our repos:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/reference/migrate-packages-config-to-package-reference#package-compatibility-issues - I recall some install.ps1 scripts that run after the nuget restore - but I cannot remember which repos we used it in.

Is it worth using this in a few spots? I feel if we do it we should atleast be consistent throughout entire repos at a time.

[scottmitchell]

@QilongTang This is cool, but I don't fully understand the benefits.

[QilongTang]

@scottmitchell @mjkkirschner Dealing with packages in a single center location has huge benefit

1. Takes much less disk space since all nuget packages will be stored in a single folder instead of different packages folders under each solution folder
2. Benefit branch build process hugely. If you recall, switching release branches in Dynamo and DynamoRevit give people such a pain because they have to delete all the packages downloaded near the solution and rebuild again. Doing this theoretically people can switched between branches and just build because references will all be fetched from central location, off course when each branch is set up that way. But we will not get the benefit without starting from now.
3. csproj files become much easier to read because we can only include the direct dependencies.

I actually do not agree that we should only do it when we want to align all the slns, that sounds like never to me. For internal repo which are mostly used by our team, we should strike for efficiency.

[mjkkirschner]

@QilongTang seems we can close this now?

[QilongTang]

@mjkkirschner Yes, finally