Just curious, per my title above.
I am leaning towards a nuget package-like style, where the dev team can continuously update libraries (dll's) and deploy them to a central location e.g. Nuget. Then, have project reference the dll depending on the version that's been deployed in a central location e.g. Nuget.
Deploying the dll's in a shared folder won't work.
Please advise, thanks.
Actually, nuget is the best way.
Pack
You can work with your teammates to maintain the same nuget project. When you are creating a nuget package or make some changes, you can just set different nuget versions for them to pack them as nuget package(.nupkg). These are different pack functions(non-sdk project uses nuget.exe, new-sdk projects use dotnet cli, msbuild.exe can work with both of them but note in non-sdk projects, it works with non-sdk projects with PackageReference).
Push
When you finish it, you could push the nuget package into a a shared folder, or push into an azure devops feed.
Use
You just send the full path of the shared folder or the feed url link(they should give your teammates sufficient permissions)
And anyone who wants to use it should set the link into nuget package sources, and then they can install it to use it.
Besides, if there is a subsequent update operation, as a nuget maintainer, you modify the lib project, after that, set a new version for it, any descriptions to tell others there is a new release updated version during pack process.
Then, push the new version into the feed to let others could install it.
I'm using TFS for the first time and attempting a build. I'm getting the error:
This project references NuGet package(s) that are missing on this computer. use NuGet Package Restore to download them.
I realize that there are many similar posts on StackOverflow and I've searched through quite a few of them. What I've gathered is that the two boxes under Package Restore in Package Manager Settings should be checked (but that this is also irrelevant now because they're checked by default). I verified that mine were both checked anyway.
The next piece of advice I considered is deleting the /packages folder from the Source Control version of my application. There is no packages folder there OR in my local (pre migration to TFS) version of the application. Instead, there's a ../packages/ folder (up one level) from the application folder. It seems that, at some point, I've opted to store the packages for all of my applications in the same folder? If so, where is this setting and what do I need to change it to either in my local version or in Source Control Explorer?
Thanks!
I'm using team foundation service with Git, and I notice when I first checked in my code, all the dlls in the packages folder were not included.
1) If I want to set up CI on the cloud, would I then have to include all these nuget packages into source control?
2) If I have multiple projects, do I have to upload the same dlls for each project into source control also?
3) What is a common strategy to multiple projects, all of them with very similar, if not similar dll references when checking them into source control + CI?
Have a look at NuGet Package Restore.
In a nutshell, it will automatically download missing packages from nuget.org, so you don't have do commit them.
The latest version (2.7) introduced some breaking changes so check the version you are using...
I am working on projects in a TFS environment. The work is distributed to several machines with different developers. A person, who is installing a dependency with NuGet into a project, get's actual dll's to his machine. When another user on another machine Gets Latest Version, he has the project with the dependency, but not the actual dll's, so the dep. is marked with an exclamation mark.
We manually add dll's to a source control, and have to be calling Get Latest Version of a Source Control Window, not on in the solution explorer on a different machine, in order to get the dependency dll.
Is there a way to just make TFS store dll's automatically, to facilitate the process discribed above?
You can get the dependencies at compile time. Take a look at this link
With newer versions of NuGet it is possible to configure a project to automatically restore NuGet packages so that the packages folder doesn't need to be included in the source code repository. Good.
However, this command adds a new .nuget folder and there is a binary there, NuGet.exe. This can also be re-created automatically by Visual Studio and so it doesn't feel correct to add that to version control. However, without this folder Visual Studio won't even load the solution properly.
How do you people deal with this? Add .nuget to source control? Run some command line script before opening the solution?
This post is old, you should not be using solution level NuGet package restore anymore. As of version 2.7+ there is an option in the NuGet setup to automatically restore packages on build.
So the .nuget folder can be deleted and the option removed from your projects.
http://docs.nuget.org/docs/reference/package-restore
UPDATE: With the release of NuGet 4.x and .NET Standard 2.0, when you use the new csproj format you can now use package references, ironically reintroducing the dependency on msbuild to restore packages, but now packages are a first class citizen of msbuild. The link above also makes mention of the PackageReference, but the following announcement details it better:
https://blog.nuget.org/20170316/NuGet-now-fully-integrated-into-MSBuild.html
And the NuGet 4.x RTM announcement, which ironically isn't as useful:
https://blog.nuget.org/20170308/Announcing-NuGet-4.0-RTM.html
UPDATE 2: Apparently with VS2017 you can even use package references with classic csproj projects, but they aren't backwards compatible anymore, and there have been some problems with restoring package sub-dependencies. I'm sure that will all be resolved.
#Richard Szalay's answer is right - you don't need to commit nuget.exe. If for some reasons Visual Studio does not automatically download the nuget.exe, make sure you have the following set to true in the nuget.targets file:
<!-- Download NuGet.exe if it does not already exist -->
<DownloadNuGetExe Condition=" '$(DownloadNuGetExe)' == '' ">true</DownloadNuGetExe>
Close the VS solution, reopen it and build it. Visual Studio should download nuget.exe automatically now.
According to this thread, the .nuget folder should be version controlled.
You need to commit .nuget\nuget.targets, but not nuget.exe. The targets will download the exe if it doesn't exist, as long as you change DownloadNuGetExe to true in nuget.targets
Although I usually don't like the idea of adding exe's to source control, I would suggest that source control should contain anything that is required in order to open, build and execute the project.
In this case it sounds like the .nuget folder is a required dependency. Therefore it ought to be under source control.
The only question left, that you need to research, is how NuGet is going to react if that folder is marked read-only, which TFS will do once it has been checked in.
Update:
I did a little more research on this as I've never used NuGet before. http://blog.davidebbo.com/2011/03/using-nuget-without-committing-packages.html
I would suggest that probably what you want to do is make NuGet a requirement that has to be installed on every developers workstation.
Further, you should place in source control the batch file required to get a workstation ready to start editing the project. The batch file is going to run the commands necessary to get and install the dependency packages.
Beyond that I'd say you might want to contact NuGet directly to ask them how, exactly, this is supposed to work.
Now that nuget supports package restoration we're looking at it more closely.
We use Subversion for source control, and my initial thoughts are that .nuget should be added to our repository, but added using svn:externals so that it points to a single location.
That way we can automatically push out new versions to all developers and projects. For projects on release branches, rather than HEAD, we can specify the revision of svn:externals reference if we want to leave nuget alone.
We have a lot of projects, so it also means not duplicating nuget.exe multiple times in the repo.
We have the nuget.config file in the folder, as it has the references to our internal Nuget server, using the Package Sources area:
https://docs.nuget.org/consume/nuget-config-settings
Apart from this reason, you should let Visual Studio handle the downloading of packages.