PackageReference support in FSharp projects

[le-agould]

Hi,

Could you give some indication as to when support for PackageReference project directive will include F Sharp projects - Thanks...

[heng-liu]

When I check in VS2017(15.9.6), all F# projects are .Net Core and .Net Standard, so all of them support PackageReference. Not sure which version of VS do you use and what kind of project do you create?
/cc @cartermp

[cartermp]

@heng-liu is correct, F# has full support for PackageReference provided you are using .NET SDK-style projects.

[le-agould]

@cartermp / @heng-liu - Thanks for your reply, however, when I manage NuGet Packages in Visual Studio Professional 2017 (Latest v15.9.5) F# projects ignore the "Default Package Management" setting of "PackageReference" and creates/adds to Packages.config file. This is contrary to C# projects which honours the setting and adds a PackageReference to the project file.

[le-agould]

Updated to Visual Studio Professional v15.9.6 and same - packages.config is created/updated for F# projects, ignoring the "Default Package Management" setting of "PackageReference"

[cartermp]

@le-agould Are you using .NET SDK-style projects? If you're not, then it will still use packages.config. F# support for PackageReference is with .NET SDK-style projects only.

[le-agould]

@cartermp - Hi Phillip - The solution is a C# .NET Framework v4.6 class library with NUnit based unit tests written in F#. Not sure what you mean by ".NET SDK-style projects only."

[cartermp]

@le-agould .NET SDK-style means a project type that uses the .NET SDK. You can see an example if you create a new .NET Core project, or use dotnet new with one of the templates that comes with the .NET CLI.

I suspect your NUnit tests are using the non-.NET SDK style projects based on what you are saying. The resolution to this is to create a new project (perhaps with dotnet new nunit -lang F# and use PackageReference there. We do not have plans to support PackageReference for non-.NET SDK style projects in F#.

[le-agould]

@heng-liu - For your information...
MSBuild appears to support PackageReference for F# projects and will restore packages when specifying the target "restore" however Visual Studio does not recognise the references and shows them as missing references, unlike equivalent C# projects.
This is a bit misleading and confusing, appearing to be partially implemented.
Using Visual Studio to restore packages ignores the F# project PackageReference(s), however using MSBuild with -t:restore target does honour the F# PackageReference(s) and works as expected.

[Happypig375]

Bump. Please fix this.