Project Dependencies

NuGet manages the packages of an entire solution or project. 0:00 So let's create ourselves a project to add dependencies to. 0:04 Click File New Project. 0:07 Let's make sure we're using the latest version of .net here. 0:12 Let's start by creating a console application. 0:16 So in the templates, under Visual C# > Windows, click on Console Application. 0:19 This console app will take the data from JSON files and store it in a database. 0:25 So, let's call it JsonToDb. 0:29 We'll just create it in the default directory right here. 0:34 Now we have a basic console app project that we can start coding in. 0:39 Let's take a look at which assemblies our program depends on so far. 0:44 We can do that by looking under references in the Solution Explorer. 0:49 Each of these references represents a single .NET 0:53 assembly that our application might need in order to run. 0:56 Let's take a look at one of them. 1:00 Click on one of them, and 1:02 details about the assembly will appear in the Properties window. 1:04 If you don't have the Properties window, you can right-click on the assembly and 1:08 click Properties. 1:12 Scroll down and take a look at the Path property. 1:14 This dll file extension here stands for dynamically linked library. 1:17 So, this is where the actual library file resides on the computer. 1:21 Remember in dot net we call these DDLs assemblies. 1:26 Look a little further down to runtime version, 1:29 this assembly will work with this version of dot net or later. 1:32 A computer can have multiple versions of dot net installed on it. 1:35 Look a little further down at the version property. 1:40 This is the actual version number of this specific assembly. 1:44 Looking back at this list of references, this seems like a lot of dependencies for 1:48 an app that doesn't do anything yet. 1:52 It turns out that our app as it's written right now 1:55 doesn't actually need any of these. 1:57 Visual Studio added these references when it created the project from the console 2:00 application template, because they're a commonly used assemblies. 2:04 It added them automatically because it suspects that some 2:08 time in the future we'll want them. 2:11 Having them here doesn't hurt anything, 2:13 because all the assemblies here are already part of 2:15 the .Net framework that's installed on every Windows computer. 2:18 So it's not like having these dependencies is going to increase the size of our app 2:21 to demonstrate this. 2:26 Let's go ahead and build this app. 2:27 First, let's change the build configuration to release so 2:30 that we can make sure that it's only building what's needed to 2:34 run this program on another computer. 2:37 Let's click build and then build solution. 2:39 See here that we can type Ctrl+Shift+B on the keyboard instead, the project build. 2:43 Now let's take a look at the project's bin directory. 2:50 I right clicking on the project's name and clicking Open Folder in File Explorer. 2:53 When Visual Studio builds a Windows application, 2:58 it copies all of the files that are needed to run the program into the bin directory. 3:00 Take a look inside the bin directory, and then go inside the Release folder. 3:05 All these vshost and PDB files are only used by Visual Studio. 3:11 The exe.config file allows us to change the runtime configuration of the program. 3:16 Technically, JsonToDb.exe is the only file we really need. 3:22 Notice that all of those other DLLs that were listed in references aren't here. 3:28 We just expect that they'll be on the users' computers 3:32 as part of the .NET Framework. 3:35 Most developers just leave these references here 3:37 a fun way to explore these assemblies is to look at the object browser window. 3:40 We can open it by clicking on view and 3:45 Object Browser over here on the left side of the window. 3:48 We see a list of all the assemblies that are application is using so far. 3:52 We can explore around them by clicking this triangle. 3:56 Now we can see all of the types that this assembly provides organized by name space. 4:00 To see what our program really needs in order to run, we can remove 4:06 all of the references over here by selecting them all, right clicking and 4:10 clicking remove, then confirm that we really want to remove these items. 4:15 Removing these assemblies from references just tells Visual Studio 4:21 that they shouldn't be considered dependencies of our application anymore. 4:25 I'll build the solution by typing control+Shift+B to show that the project 4:29 builds just fine without these references. 4:32 See here in the output window shows that everything built successfully, 4:35 notice that in the Object Browser there are still a few items. 4:39 Json to DB is our executable assembly MSCoreLib and 4:43 system.core are the core of the .Net Framework. 4:48 Every .Net project at a minimum has a dependency on these two assemblies. 4:52 Even though they aren't listed in the references of the project, 4:57 they're considered implicit dependencies of our project. 5:00 I encourage you to explore around these assemblies a bit to see 5:03 what these provide you. 5:07 You'll see that you can do a lot with just what's in MS core lib, 5:08 even with everything that done it provides right out of the box, inevitably 5:13 you want to leverage some libraries that don't come pre-installed with .Net. 5:17 That's where NuGet comes in our project 5:21 is about as simple as a project in visual studio can be. 5:24 In the next video let's start adding to it. 5:28