I created a new asp.net project, and I am using the monodevelop as the ide.
On the left hand side in the explorer I can see two sections, one is called reference and the other called packages.
I assume that references are the library or dependency files like the jar equivalent of java. Then what are the packages section for?
Is it also another kind of dependency?
Can anybody help me understand the meaning of those two sections?
I assume you mean References and Packages. There is no Resources section/folder when I create an ASP.NET project in MonoDevelop.
The References folder will show the assemblies that are being referenced by your project. An assembly is equivalent to a jar file.
The Packages folder shows you the NuGet packages that are being used by your project. A NuGet package will typically provide assemblies and these will be shown inside the References folder but within a From Packages folder. A NuGet package may include other things, such as content files, which are added to the project, or custom MSBuild targets which modify the build behaviour.
Related
The IT industry loves to create buzzwords, some new, some are new twists on old things. In .NET Core I read about Packages, References, NuGet Packages, DLL files and Namespaces. I understand the simple basics/steps, but is there a consistent relationship between some/all of the above words?
Does a single Reference ALWAYS point to a single Package?
Is one Package ALWAYS made of one DLL?
Is NuGet Package same as a Package?
What is the relationship between DLL file and Packages? 1 to 1, 1 to many? None?
Creating a Reference - is doing what? Is it pointing to ONE Package or Many?
When I use "Using ABC.123.DEF;", am I creating a new Reference? If not, would I already have created a Reference to that? What does Creating a Reference do, includes the DLLs (other files) in my project, or just tells the compiler to do so at compile time?
Finally, what form does MetaPackage take in Core 3? Is it a NuGet Package?
DLL File
A .dll (Dynamic Linked Library) file is a library that contains code and data that can be used by more than one program, each project that uses it adds a reference to it
Nuget Packages
Put simply, a NuGet package is a single ZIP file with the .nupkg extension that contains compiled code (DLLs), when you use Nuget pckage manager console to add packages. if i write a library that would be usefull to other developers, i can publish it to Nuget as a nuget package
Read more about nuget packages
Package Reference
A reference is essentially an entry in a project file that contains the information that Visual Studio needs to locate the component or the service.
for example, if you want to use EntityFramework in your project, you need to install it with the following command
Install-Package EntityFramework
This adds a package reference in the .csproj file
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer" Version="3.1.1" />
Note: versions may vary
I have an assembly that is causing me problems (Sigil v4.7). I can see that it is in my project (via AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies() and Object Browser).
But I can't figure out what NuGet package brought it in.
Visual Studio has a Tree View of packages:
But short of drilling all the way down all of them, I cannot find a way to see which package is causing an assembly to be included in my project.
Is there a way to search to find which NuGet Package caused Sigil 4.7 to be added to my project?
Looks like you can search for dependencies by name in the solution explorer:
If you can't find it there, you can look at the <Project>.deps.json file in the bin\<Configuration>\<Platform> folder.
For example, I have a project called Potato.csproj building in Debug for net core 3.0, so the file is bin\Debug\netcoreapp3.0\Potato.deps.json
It lists all dependencies, as well as what project a dependency came from.
My solution file contains a website project and some library projects. My website project is depending on these library projects and some other nuget packages. I have to build my .sln by MS Build. By executing nuget.exe all dependencies are loaded, but their references not updated to packages folder. When I google my problem I found the following solution.
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/823752/ASP-NET-Website-Project-External-Assembly-Referenc.
But it did not solve my problem as I do not want to keep bin folder and I also do not want to keep the .refresh files of all the DLL. I need to load all external dependencies and referenced automatically, when I build .sln file.
ASP.NET website update assemblies references without modifying .refresh file
If I understand you correct, you can add a class library project to the solution, and add reference to the class library project to your website. Then, add the nuget in the class library, not the website project.
Then you could use nuget.exe update those nuget packages for the solution, like:
nuget.exe update "<YourWebsitePath>\WebSite1.sln"
In this way, When your build website, it pulls in all the class libraries' dependencies in turn.
If I am not understand you correct, please let me know for free and you can share a simple sample about your question, so that we could understand it more clearly.
Hope this helps.
I'm working on an ASP.NET MVC 5 project that was initially using Nuget for static content like Bootstrap, jQuery etc. I have now switched to bower as it is the way to go and is also integrated with visual studio.
I noticed that when installing bower packages, they are not automatically included into the project. So I have left them out for now but is this a good idea? Should bower packages be included or not? It doesn't make any difference to access because in my BundleConfig.cs file I'm still able to link these files to aliases as before.
bower will download the entire package using Git.
Your package must be publically available at a Git endpoint (e.g., GitHub). Remember to push your Git tags!
This means that bower will actually download the entire repository/release for you to use in your ASP project. I've tested this with bootstrap and jQuery. These repositories can contain many many files so including them into the .csproj file will clutter your project file and may not be ideal.
This can be compared to using nuget packages where we are only referencing external packages in the packages.config file but we do not include the dll and other assemblies into the project. This leads me to think that bower_components should indeed not be included in the project; this makes no difference to usage as you can still reference the packages and use the files.
About: I have a ASP.NET website (not Web project) with 3 class library projects in the solution. Earlier I was using SVN but now Git is used source management. I have installed the git locally on a computer (used as server) and using it for merging the source code from other developers. Also, I am using Visual studio 2015 community edition which provides the tools to work with git.
Problem: After cloning the project from the master repository, I build the project to run it. Building the project shows a dialog box saying "Package Restore is in progress". This process creates a folder named "Packages" and that folder includes every package listed in the packages.config file. But after restoration completes, the project throws the following exception:
This exception shows for each package (Autofac here).
The type or namespace name 'Autofac' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)
Work around To Solve this problem, I need to uninstall each package and installed it again and problem is solved. This thing I need to do again and again for each developer machine, which is frustrating and time consuming too.
Does anyone has faced the same problem working with Nuget, git and website in ASP.NET.
I faced a problem like this before. In my case, the reason was that I changed the project path (moved the project to another directory), and the path of the packages directory (that contains the NuGet packages) was stored in the csproj file for the old path, that is VS cannot restore NuGet packages. The solution for this was to edit the csproj manually and make it referring to the correct new packages path.
If this doesn't work for you, you can still use your workaround, but using the following PowerShell command (in NuGet Console) for simplicity:
Update-Package -reinstall -Project Your.Project.Name
Note: project name doesn't contain csproj extension, just the project name
It is good practice to not put third party packages into source control. It bloats your repository (even on a large web application, the size of the external packages will massively out weigh your code).
If NuGet package restore is slow, you could look at using a local cache (this can be as simple as a shared folder) or a better internet connection.
That said, you should only have this problem once per machine. While the packages are downloading you could be giving the new team member an overview of the design…
Make sure that all of your projects are using the same target framework, when this isn't done you can often get the
type or namespace [name] could not be found
warning.
To do this, right click each of the projects in the solution explorer > Properties > Application tab > Target Framework. They should all be the same or there will be incompatibilities between the references in your projects. Here's a question regarding this, hopefully this helps.
The main reason is there no Autofac reference in packages.config file.
When you see on the screen Restore packages message box this mean that nuget package manager is trying to install all the packages which are missing in the package folder.
Try to do this step:
In Visual Studio Solution Explorer pick the project and via context menu pick Unload project
After project was unloaded via context menu pick Edit your project
Go to section group and find you Autofac Reference section
If HintPath doesnt looks like ..\packages\Autofac.4.1.1\lib\net45\Autofac.dll (Actual for 4.1.1 version) remove the Autofac reference Item
Save csproj file and reload project
Install Autofac via NuGet Package manager
Commit and push changes to git repository
Had the same problem with VS 2019. In ASP.NET, packages are updated via the .refresh files that appear in your bin folders. If these aren't checked into Git, they wouldn't be copied down to your cloned repro.
I added the .refresh files for all of my package dlls, made sure the versions and paths in the .refresh files were correct, and now everything updates as expected.