CPM - Provide option to explicitly use version tags

[DaleMckeown]

NuGet Product(s) Affected

NuGet.exe, Visual Studio Package Management UI, Visual Studio Package Manager Console

Current Behavior

Currently, when CPM is used and new NuGet packages are added to a solution, the Version attribute is added to the PackageVersion in the Directory.Packages.props file.

<Project>
  <PropertyGroup>
    <ManagePackageVersionsCentrally>true</ManagePackageVersionsCentrally>
  </PropertyGroup>
  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageVersion Include="Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore" Version="7.0.10" />
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

When it comes to git usage, this causes issues when dependency updating tools such as Dependabot are used, because git uses the line before and after to detect changes. If consecutive packages are updated in the same Dependabot run, this will cause merge conflicts, which require manual intervention to fix.

Desired Behavior

The git conflicts are really easy to fix by explicitly using version tags in the package reference, like so:

<Project>
  <PropertyGroup>
    <ManagePackageVersionsCentrally>true</ManagePackageVersionsCentrally>
  </PropertyGroup>
  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageVersion Include="Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore">
      <Version>7.0.10</Version>
    </PackageVersion>
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

When adding new packages to a solution, we have to remember to manually amend the package references to this format. It would be better if we could specify a flag that would enforce NuGet to use the explicit version tags automatically, instead of using the inline attribute string.

A property such as UseExplicitPackageVersionTags could be used to enable this behaviour.

<Project>
  <PropertyGroup>
    <ManagePackageVersionsCentrally>true</ManagePackageVersionsCentrally>
    <UseExplicitPackageVersionTags>true</UseExplicitPackageVersionTags>
  </PropertyGroup>
  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageVersion Include="Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore">
      <Version>7.0.10</Version>
    </PackageVersion>
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

Additional Context

This would improve the developer experience for CPM users, where package update processes are in place.

[donnie-msft]

/cc @jeffkl