Display difference:
The way you see your projects in the Solution Explorer depends on the format of their .csproj
file.
In the old format (xml 2003 or similar) you have a References
sub-tree, where every project reference, package dependency, system framework reference and third-party libraries are shown.
In the new format, you have a Dependencies
sub-tree, which in turn has a sub-tree for every different type of dependency.
There are some differences as to how the two are implemented, but in general the only big difference (if you are not going into .csproj
files and such) is how they are shown in the Solution Explorer.
Note that this display is project dependent, so you can have different displays for different projects in the same solution.
NuGet packages:
The difference in the usage and restoration of your NuGet packages comes from the following. The old format uses packages.config
configuration by default, which means that every project holds all the packages in needs in a local cache.
On the other hand, the new format uses Package Reference
configuration by default, where all the packages in the solution are restored to a central cache in the user directory (usually at %user%/.nuget/packages
).