Remove packages from repository and use NuGet package restore

[TrevorPilley]

Having the packages in the repository adds considerable size to the repository and can introduce annoying merge conflicts with dll files. It also bloats commits when adding/updating packages.

Is there a good reason to have them in source?

[yellis]

The original reason for this is because at one point there were some internal (to StackExchange) nugets being used in building the repository, and storing all of the packages in the repo was the best way to guarantee that we were always building it the way that we wanted.

However, for quite some time we have been consuming only public nugets, so as you point out, there is no reason anymore to save /packages.

Before I gut these out, I need to make sure that our internal builds are able to retrieve the nugets and build properly. It is on my todo list, I will update here when this is ready.

[TrevorPilley]

OK sounds good, the only slight annoyance I've encountered by using package restore is that you can sometimes get old versions left in /packages on the build server which need manually deleting.

[yellis]

Packages are gone!