Supporting Package Reference in UWP WPF WinForms and Classic Libraries

Issue

Spec for the work is available here: - https://github.com/NuGet/Home/issues/3561

Problem

Currently there are multiple ways (packages.config, project.json and PackageReference in csproj) of managing dependencies and we want to standardize on one global way of managing dependencies. Its hard on customers to read and understand about multiple ways of managing dependencies.

Who is the customer?

All .NET Customers who want to move towards managing dependencies via the model built for project.json.

Solution

There are 2 key scenarios at play here.

• Customers who want to move from package.config to PackageReference
• Customers who want to move from project.json to PackageReference

Supported VS Versions

One thing to note is that PackageReference support is only available in VS "15" RTM+ versions of Visual Studio. Customers upgrading to PackageReference will be unable to roundtrip their projects with previous versions of Visual Studio including VS 2015