I'm using a Nuget package that itself references a previous version of System.Reactive (specifically 4.3.2). I am not the maintainer and cannot change that, but would still like to use the package. However, all the projects in my solution reference a newer version of System.Reactive (5.0.0), and I am currently not at liberty to change that. This leads to a versioning conflict.
Back in the day I would use binding redirects, but we've transitioned to .NET Core and PackageRefernces recently, and it's unclear to me how I resolve such version conflicts using PackageReferences.
Two closely (I would assume) related questions then:
Is it possible to resolve the above scenarion, and if so, how?
How would one resolve the reverse situation (newer version in external package, older version in my solution/projects)?
Fundamentally, because you're resolving against two different major versions, there's currently no pleasant way of resolving this.
The fact that System.Reactive went from 4.x to 5.x suggests there are breaking changes, assuming it's actually following SemVer. So it's entirely possible that the package you're depending on relies on something in System.Reactive that was removed in 5.0.
Unless you want to get into loading the assemblies yourself using AssemblyLoadContext as a sort of isolation level, you're basically out of luck. .NET simply doesn't handle this situation well at the moment.
I suggest you work out the least painful way of getting everything onto the same major version. This could mean:
Downgrading your System.Reactive dependency
Persuading the maintainer of the other package to upgrade their System.Reactive dependency (which will mean them creating a new major version as well...)
Forking the other package so that you can upgrade its System.Reactive dependency yourself
None of these is likely to be simple, unfortunately.
When using .NET Core, you should find binding redirects unnecessary in this case.
I'll refer you to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/concepts/dependency-resolution#dependency-resolution-with-packagereference
If you are getting a nuget failure, you likely need to add a direct PackageReference to the problematic library, in order to enforce "Nearest wins" behaviour. I'm assuming the structure is something like:
Project:
-> NugetPackage1
-> System.Reactive (=5.0.0)
-> NugetPackage2
-> System.Reactive (=4.3.2)
and the suggested change would be to make it into:
Project:
-> NugetPackage1
-> System.Reactive (=5.0.0)
-> NugetPackage2
-> System.Reactive (=4.3.2)
-> System.Reactive (5.0.0)
(Please note that this kind of failure only happens if the package requirements explicitly conflict - in this case both packages want a specific version, rather than simply a version greater than X.)
Note that if you wanted to make the direct PackageReference the lower of the two versions, that would work as well.
If the versioning conflict is a runtime exception, please post the exception.
Related
I'm looking for a simple way to manage NuGet packages for the whole solution, to prevent conflicts between transitive NuGet packages when assembling all files into one installer.
When building a project all direct and indirect dependencies are analyzed and the NuGet resolution picks up the best matching version for each NuGet that is at least the same version as the lowest version and might also create binding redirects if necessary. (all good and fine)
The problem we have lately encountered was when we build the whole solution (200+ projects) at once, the resulting NuGet versions between all top level projects might not be identical. And due to the fact, that all resulting DLL and EXE files are installed into the same program files folder, the application can and will crash at runtime due to version mismatches when loading assemblies.
To better understand this issue I've created this sample repo.
The dependency graph looks like this:
Library1
Microsoft.IdentityModel.Tokens-5.2.1
Executable1
System.IdentityModel.Tokens.Jwt-5.3.0 (transitive reference: Microsoft.IdentityModel.Tokens-5.3.0)
Library1
results in: Microsoft.IdentityModel.Tokens-5.3.0
Executable2
Microsoft.IdentityModel.Tokens-5.2.1
results in: Microsoft.IdentityModel.Tokens-5.2.1
To demonstrate the problem, all projects compile to the same bin folder. When the whole solution is compiled and Executable2 is started, the application crashes, since the application expects Microsoft.IdentityModel.Tokens in version 5.2.1 but the actual version is 5.3.0.
For this constructed sample it is easy to find the problem and fix it with updating the Microsoft.IdentityModel.Tokens NuGet to the same version. (Manually, since Visual Studio Package Manager does not recognize this conflict in the consolidate tab).
But at a much greater scale it is far more complex to find those mismatches.
What we have found so far
Centrally managing NuGet package versions
Since it is not yet available, it cannot be used to solve the issue here.
Microsoft.Build.CentralPackageVersions
Unfortunately there is no IDE support for it, which makes managing NuGet packages very uncomfortable, which I would like to avoid if possible.
So my question is what is the best approach to avoid NuGet version conflicts between projects within the same solution?
We've experienced the same problem with some of our projects. We've been using Paket package manager since a couple of years and this has resolved that issue for us.
In short: you define on your solution level which packages you want to use in a file called 'paket.dependencies'. You can be very specific about versions, or let packet use the latest greatest. Then you can specify per project which NuGet package you want to use within that project in a 'paket.references' file. As the name implies, you reference to a package in the paket.dependencies file.
This will make sure, all references packages in your project will use the same package version. I hope this suits your needs as well.
My problem is very similar to that mentioned in this post:
System.ObservableExtensions.Subscribe: ambiguous reference
I would like to use the "GraphQL for .NET" nuget package and the "Plugin.BluetoothLE" package.
"GraphQL for .NET" references System.Reactive.Core and "Plugin.BluetoothLE" references System.Reactive
As stated in the other post:
Upon further investigation I found that ObservableExtensions exists both System.Reactive.Core and System.Reactive.
How do I resolve this? "Plugin.BluetoothLE" has System.Reactive 4.0.0 and "GraphQL for .NET" has System.Reactive.Core 3.1.1.
Is there a way for me to upgrade System.Reactive.Core inside GraphQL?
I havent tried this below but you can see on their github it was described as breaking change and there is workaround. see the highlighted sentence below.
v4.0 changes
Due to the overwhelming pain that fixing #205 - Implement assembly version strategy caused, we have refactored the libraries into a single library System.Reactive. To prevent breaking existing code that references the v3 libraries, we have facades with TypeForwarders to the new assembly. If you have a reference to a binary built against v3.0, then use the new System.Reactive.Compatibility package.
Supported Platforms
Rx 4.1 supports the following platforms
.NET Framework 4.6+
.NET Standard 2.0+ (including .NET Core, Xamarin and others)
UWP
Notably, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and legacy PCL libraries are no longer supported.
v3.0 breaking changes
The NuGet packages have changed their package naming in the move from v2.x.x to v3.0.0
Rx-Main is now System.Reactive
Rx-Core is now System.Reactive.Core
Rx-Interfaces is now System.Reactive.Interfaces
Rx-Linq is now System.Reactive.Linq
Rx-PlatformServices is now System.Reactive.PlatformServices
Rx-Testing is now Microsoft.Reactive.Testing
This brings the NuGet package naming in line with NuGet guidelines and also the dominant namespace in each package. The strong name key has also changed, which is considered a breaking change. However, there are no expected API changes, therefore, once you make the NuGet change, no code changes should be necessary.
One of two ways
Try setting Nuget to get the minimum version to the lowest one listed by your packages.
Split out the operations into separate libraries and manage the differing package version specific to library.
Today I was adding a NuGet package DocumentFormat.OpenXml into my C# project. My C# project is targeting.Net framework v4.5. In NuGet package manager it shows the information of dependencies of the NuGet package as shown below:
There is no information corresponding to .Net Framework v4.5. So, how do I interpret this information if my project is targeting .Net Framework v4.5. Is this information missing or there is any default assumption in such cases may be no dependencies. Can someone share some information in this regard
Note: This question might look like a non-programming question but I got stuck even before writing a single line of code so asking it in this forum.
.NET Frameworks are backwards compatible. Meaning if your project is targeting v4.5, you can consume packages with lower versions, such as v4.0, v3.5.
NuGet's specialty is compatibility checking (if packages are authored correctly ofc) :)
NuGet knows the available frameworks are v3.5, v4.0, v4.6 and netstandard1.3.
The "nearest" compatible framework with v4.5 is v4.0, so it'll pick the v4.0 assets when you install it.
So the answer, it has no dependencies in your case.
Please note that framework compatibility is not always apparent from just looking at the TFMs on nuget.org, there's different fallbacks that NuGet will attempt.
So really the best way to figure out what the dependencies are would be to install it in the project, since NuGet might need to resolve conflicts etc. if you have other dependencies.
I am confused with packaging of HttpClient. Earlier it was distributed as a part of Microsoft.Http.Net NuGet package while System.Net.Http was considered legacy. Looks like now it's the opposite: there is a fresh System.Net.Http package for all platforms and Microsoft.Net.Http has not been updated in a while and according to folks at Microsoft development team is going to be deprecated.
Questions then:
Can we replace dependencies on Microsoft.Net.Http NuGet package with (the newest) System.Net.Http?
Should legacy .NET 4.0 platform still use Microsoft.Net.Http?
What about non-Windows platforms (iOS, Android)? The new System.Net.Http supports them, but I remember with Microsoft.Net.Http I had to install additionally Microsoft.Bcl.Build and Microsoft.Bcl in order to get cross-platform stuff to work. System.Net.Http doesn't depend on them. Can Bcl packages be skipped?
System.Net.Http lacks some Http extension methods, like SupportsPreAuthenticate, and an attempt to call these method results in runtime errors (missing method). How should we deal with this?
This has been for a long time and continues to be confusing. I have seen such messaging myself but as of right now, it appears System.Net.Http is the correct choice, at least for .NET on the Windows platform and has no external dependencies.
For .NET Core, I have used Microsoft.Net.Http although it does require Microsoft.BCL. Unless you are experiencing problems, I suggest leaving legacy systems as-is, especially since these namespaces seem to be moving targets.
If that isn't confusing enough for you, the HttpClient Sample linked from System.Net.Http uses Windows.Web.Http! That implementation is for Windows Store apps.
Perhaps next year this will all change again.
We are developing a WPF application at work which has various "common" dependencies (Unity, Prism, etc.).
It's all fine when adding new projects and then setting up the NuGet package dependency per project but when it comes to upgrades, it's really painful as it means we have to go through each and every project, delete the old references and then refetch the latest packages from NuGet.
Today for instance, I was tasked with upgrading Prism from 5.0 to 6.0 (which has breaking changes anyway) and this meant, in addition to fixing all the namespace conflicts, etc. that I had to go through every project, delete the old references, add the new dependecies and rinse and repeat.
My question is, is there a smarter way to deal with this problem or is this the standard approach?
Many thanks in advance,
Update:
I am mostly concerned with "major" upgrades which don't show up on the package manager. Version 5.0 -> 6.0 upgrade would be treated as a major upgrade and hence, would not have an automatic update applied to it in the NuGet package manager.
I don't expect NuGet to be able to do this automatically for me since such upgrades may (and often do) include breaking changes but I would like to know if there's a way to do the major upgrades less painfully than deleting the references from the projects and the packages.config for every project and then re-adding them using NuGet. For a relatively large project, this is very time consuming and I was wondering if anyone had a better way of managing such dependencies.
If you use VS2013 like you say, you can manage ALL your NuGet packages by right-clicking on your Solution and selecting 'Manage NuGet Packages For Solution'. This brings up a dialog where you can view all packages installed for all projects in the solution and all packages that have updates available. When you do upgrade the packages, VS takes care of all the reference changes required. If the package has breaking changes, then you're still on the hook for fixing those.
Disclaimer: I've never worked on a WPF project/solution but for Web/Forms apps, NuGet packages are handled this way.
I can understand your pain because i had the similar problem like you, but there is no easy way. but certainly you need to break the process differently of your daily development and your dependency update roll-out.
for the project i worked on, I use the common repository path that shared among the solutions that you work on, and you need to delete all the solutions folder references in order to get a clean state.
For each solution you work on you need to modify the property group that point to the common target repository (i'm using relative path)
Once all the things setup, you can actually perform an update with a script(I'm using python run-time script)
you can actually look at setting up common nuget-packages-folder for reference updates for detail, but it seems like what you looking at for the automate process
I had a similar problem when trying to upgrade multiple packages with alpha channel issues in Xamarin Studio, which also does not have the niceties of VS 2015 NuGet manager. I ended up writing a very simple PowerShell script that I run multiple times a day.
#
# This script updates local ibGib NuGet packages for mobileGib Android app solution.
# For convenience in copy+paste in manager console:
# ../UpdateLocalNugetPackages.ps1
Update-Package commonGib
Update-Package ibGib
Update-Package languageGib.Biz
Etc.
I believe you could tailor your NuGet commands to fit your needs.
Also, just in case you aren't aware of it, you should definitely read the NuGet command line reference. I may be mistaken, but it sounds like your scenario is doable with the Update command.