Comments on: Dependency Management in .Net

By: Mo Cassidy

Mo Cassidy — Fri, 18 May 2012 19:25:00 +0000

I don’t post a lot of comments on blog articles, but I really like how this was written with the history of the industry as well as your own experiences.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:21:00 +0000

It isn’t really that I’d like a single folder (I actually prefer separate folders), but it’s just how Visual Studio and the assembly loader work. If I use some library which has 3 dependencies that each have 3 dependencies, I have to go reference 10 assemblies to use that one library. If the next version drops 2 of these assemblies and adds 3 more either directly or transitively, I have to adjust across as many projects as I have referencing the single library I want to use.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:52:00 +0000

And you answered the question. You could put a hint path in for transitive dependencies….

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:50:00 +0000

Now I understand what you mean. That’s an interesting use case. Why the single folder?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:49:00 +0000

This was new in 1.4 I believe. I could be wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:18:00 +0000

The -OutputDirectory switch allows you to specify the destination of where the package directories will be created, but it doesn’t allow you download all the assemblies to a single folder. This is really the only way to get Visual Studio to copy over transitive dependencies without having to reference them directly.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:15:00 +0000

It appears you’re correct. I wasn’t aware this behavior had been changed.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:42:00 +0000

“NuGet doesn’t currently allow you to retrieve transitive dependencies from a source different than the package you’re downloading.”

Do you have an example of such an item? I thought the aggregate feed had cleared that up inside of visual studio and the multiple sources specified also cleared it up. It could be by design as well. You may want to use the dependencies off of your feed instead of whatever is newest.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:38:00 +0000

-OutputDirectory will give you the ability to specify a folder.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:28:00 +0000

NuGet can exclude the version number, but I wish it also had the ability to target a specific folder (e.g. lib). This would allow you to reference projects without having to also reference transitive dependencies (e.g. I shouldn’t have to reference Iesi.Collections directly unless I’m using types from that assembly).

As far as retrieving transitive dependencies, NuGet doesn’t currently allow you to retrieve transitive dependencies from a source different than the package you’re downloading. For example, if you host some package on a private NuGet Server which has dependencies on some packages that are available on the default NuGet feed, NuGet.exe will fail to download the package from the private source unless all the dependencies are available on that source.