Support NuGet Central Package Management

For solutions using the new NuGet Central Packagement feature, trying the --upgrade option will cause dotnet-outdated to add the package versions to the csproj package references, rather than updating the package versions in Directory.Packages.props, and consequently break the build. A simplified example of how this manifests is shown below.

Updating the tool to support this NuGet feature would allow such projects to leverage the --upgrade option, rather than just needing to manually update using the console’s output as a guide on what to update.

Happy to help-out with getting this supported!

Before

Directory.Packages.Props

<Project>
  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageVersion Include="Newtonsoft.Json" Version="12.0.2" />
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

Project.csproj

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="Newtonsoft.Json" />
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

After

Directory.Packages.Props

<Project>
  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageVersion Include="Newtonsoft.Json" Version="12.0.2" />
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

Project.csproj

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
  <ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="Newtonsoft.Json">
      <Version>12.0.3</Version>
    <PackageReference>
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

[leonardochaia]

Hello all.

Just wanted to hop in and say that I’d really like this feature to be implemented and would be happy to help any way I can. I use central package management in all my projects, since it simplifies managing versions on >1 project solutions.

For dotnet-affected, we implemented a feature where we can detect which projects are affected by adding/deleting/updating a nuget package. I think that works great together with dotnet-outdated: you update all your packages, and then in CI or locally you only build/test/publish the projects that were changed/affected by the package changes.

I wanted to share our implementation for reading Directory.Packages.props, which uses MSBuild in order to do so. This supports conditions as well, which is quite nice to have (we use conditions in props files for multi framework targeting)

We also have tests where we create Directory.Packages.props files, see here Particularly, we ensure conditions are interpreted

This is the code we use for updating packages, I wouldn’t use that in production (its for testing only) but perhaps we can get some inspiration for dotnet-outdated.

Should we create a package to share this code between these two tools?

Regards, Leo.

[coderpatros]

@martincostello that would be a great addition. We would welcome this functionality.