CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.netdll
Sabrina_cs
Sabrina_cs

Reputation: 421

How to manage Nuget Packages used more than once

I am a dinosaur developer, so NuGet is relatively new to me, I am used to manage third parties open source libraries having a single project with the code or the binaries, that I will keep updated when necessary and this project publishes the dll(s) on a common folder from where I reference the libraries in all my projects. This makes easy to maintain the third party libraries and in my projects I just need to rebuild when I update the library and all goes OK. Now many open source projects publish their libraries on NuGet and it is easy to reference them in the projects, but I dread the fact that I have to download a copy of the library for each project in which I use it, this, in my opinion is something that can lead to chaos. Especially if I have 2 projects that build dlls that end up using 2 different versions of the same packages and are used both in an application with problems and conflicts. So my question to those who use NuGet from a longer time is: Can I proceed with NuGet packages as with other libraries and create a project that references them, use it to publish the dlls in a single folder and then reference the dlls of the packages from my dlls and applications on the published folder.

I hope I've been clear. Thanks for any thoughts you can share on this topic Sabrina

Upvotes: 0

Views: 196

Answers (1)

Andrei Mihalciuc
Andrei Mihalciuc

Reputation: 2258

Having all your 3rd party libraries for all your projects in a single folder can lead to dll versions hell. If you update a single dll which contains breaking changes and which is referenced by other projects, then you will have fix/rebuild all projects that references it.

To resolve the issue with downloading the same packages for every project you can create a local repository and configure Visual Studio to use your local repository. So if your local repository contains a single version of log4net, you'll be able to use only that specific version. Even more you can configure repository to use a shared folder, in this case all developers and even your build server will be able to use that repository.

There are a lot advantages of using NuGet, such as saving a lot of space on your hard disks and others. For example I created NuGet packages for our internal framework, so all our projects just reference those packages, rather than each project has its own version in its bin folder.

Upvotes: 1

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