Does nuget still require these entries in Visual Studio projects?

Question

I've noticed that new .csproj projects without these nuget directives appear to work fine. Are these a relic of the past that can be removed from projects? I scanned the nuget FAQ but did not find anything related to this.

I'm running Visual Studio 2013 and also a recent build of Xamarin Studio.

  <Import Project="$(SolutionDir)\.nuget\NuGet.targets" Condition="Exists('$(SolutionDir)\.nuget\NuGet.targets')" />
  <Target Name="EnsureNuGetPackageBuildImports" BeforeTargets="PrepareForBuild">
    <PropertyGroup>
      <ErrorText>This project references NuGet package(s) that are missing on this computer. Enable NuGet Package Restore to download them.  For more information, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=322105. The missing file is {0}.</ErrorText>
    </PropertyGroup>
    <Error Condition="!Exists('$(SolutionDir)\.nuget\NuGet.targets')" Text="$([System.String]::Format('$(ErrorText)', '$(SolutionDir)\.nuget\NuGet.targets'))" />
  </Target>

Answer 1

Those particular targets are added if you have used the Enable NuGet Package Restore menu option. In this case these targets can be removed. Visual Studio will automatically restore NuGet packages, if you have a recent version of NuGet installed, without these extra targets. This menu option has been deprecated by the NuGet team and I believe it will be removed at some point.

Note that if you are building your project on a build server you will need to create an extra step to restore the NuGet packages, using NuGet.exe restore, that would have automatically been restored when the solution was built on the build server by MSBuild.

Also note that NuGet will add very similar targets if you add a NuGet package that includes its own MSBuild .targets file, such as Microsoft.Bcl.Build. The project will work without the EnsureNuGetPackageBuildImports Target in this case, but would need the Import element that imports the MSBuild .targets file. Leaving the EnsureNuGetPackageBuildImports target in the project does give you a perhaps more useful error message as to why a build may be failing if the NuGet package is not restored.