Why should use NuGet for references
I worked on a task to review references on all projects of a product. I saw many points to be improved and made alot of changes to make the code cleaner, easier to maintain, having better architect by applying abstraction, convert third-party dependencies to first-party… This is not only a pure coding task but also it requires code review & analysis, understanding on abstraction, architecture, design patterns and best practices.
##Current situation
The product has a few solution files and each one contains from a few to dozens of projects. There are different ways of referencing between project to project at different layers and also project with external libraries.
###Internal project references There are some projects on Foundation layer and all dlls are copied to a folder “depedencies/internal”. If needed, a project refnerences to the dll under this folder.
###External dependency references Some external libraries are copied to a folder “dependencies/external”, a project will reference to the dll under this folder. Some other dependencies will be referenced by using nuget packages.
###The issues With these ways of managing dependencies, upgrade to a new version of any library is hard (both internal & external), because dependency’s version number is specified in target project.
