How to enforce same nuget package version across multiple c# projects?

Question

I have a bunch of small C# projects which use a couple of NuGet packages. I\'d like to be able to update version of a given package automatically. More then that: I\'d like

Answer 1

Thank you for asking this - so I am not alone. I put considerable time into ensuring all projects in my solution use the same package version. The NuGet user interface (and also the command line interface) also contribues to having different versions among the projects within a solution. In particular when a new project is added to the solution and package X shall be added to the new project, NuGet is overly greedy to download the latest version from nuget.org instead of using the local version first, which would be the better default handling.

I completely agree with you, that NuGet should warn if different versions of a package are used within a solution. And it should help avoiding this and fixing such version maze.

The best I found to do now is to enumerate all packages.config files within the solution folder (your projects-root) which look like

  
  ...

then sorting the xml-nodes by id and analysing the version numbers.

If any package occurs with different version numbers, making them all equal and afterwards running the NuGet command

Update-Package -ProjectName 'acme.lab.project' -Reinstall

should fix wrong package versions.

(Since NuGet is open source it would certainly be a cool thing to get our hands dirty and implement the missing version-conflict avoidance utility.)