成功的Nuget包恢复后项目不知道包

Question

I am working on a large C# project with other team members. So far the project has been kind of disorganized and every one has had their way of getting their environment up and running for development. For a new member (and future ones) I am trying to document and tighten up our development process. The project is version controlled by git and members are using VS2012, VS2015, and Monodevelop.

The C# projects in our C# solution all have NuGet packages they require. I have in the .gitignore file the following:

# NuGet Packages
*.nupkg
# Ignore the actual packages but not the config file for them
**/packages/**/*
!**/packages/repositories.config
# don't ignore build/, which is used as an MSBuild target.
!**/packages/build/

So when I push from one machine and then clone on the other, I do have a solution with projects contained with in. These projects have packages.config files, which is the xml file that contains the name of packages and versions needed.

Here Is Where My Problem Is

I tried on a fresh Windows 7 Machine with VS2015 Community Edition to clone the repo, which worked fine. Then there was a prompt to restore the NuGet packages. I did that. I can see that the packages and versions are installed with the NuGet package manager view for the project of interest: But in my References of my project they do not appear to be installed:

Tried to isolate the problem with a smaller project

I thought maybe this was odd so I closed the solution and started a new small solution with one small console application project. I added an old version of NUnit to this project and verified that the NuGet package was installed into the pakcages directory. Then I closed the solution, and deleted the packages directory. When I opened the solution it realized that the package was not there so I tried to do the restore packages action through the right click on the package menu. This worked just fine.

So I think I must have some other configuration in my big C# project messed up. I don't know if it is installing the packages somewhere else on my system. Any pointers on where to look or what configurations to look at would be helpful and appreciated!

(I have not seen this issue else where, where the package is apparently installed but the project is still unaware of it)

Update 7/28/2016 I was having a look at the nuget.config file for the solution and it appears that there was a line in there:

<add key="repositorypath" value="External\Packages" />

Then I found a directory in the same level as my solution file named External Packages . I'd like to note that the person who originally set this solution and its projects up is no longer around. So I deleted that directory and the nuget.config file. I restarted VS2015 and ran the restore NuGet Packages action. This appeared to restore the packages and made a directory called packages where they are stored now. This now mimicks what I was seeing in my small project where I tried to recreate this behavior.

But I am still running into the issue where the NuGet Package Manager says the packages are installed but the 'References' do not show them.

So I am wondering is there a way to config VS to look where these packages are stored for the references?

Answer 1

@RoberHarvey had the right solution. The problem was in the .csproj files for the projects in my solution. This was all part of a code base that never really had a good way of keeping track of packages and there were failed attempts in the past to fix it. So there were some inconsistencies persisting in my project files. This was remedied by uninstalling and reinstalling the problem packages after deleting the old nuget.config file.