In the Autofac project we’ve maintain all of the various packages and integrations in one assembly. In order to make sure each package builds against the right version of Autofac, all references are redirected through NuGet.

A challenge we face is when we are testing a new release of Autofac, we want to update specific integration projects with the latest version of Autofac so we can do testing, eventually upgrading everything as needed. Running through the GUI to do something like that is a time consumer.

Instead, I use a little script in the Package Manager Console to filter out the list of projects I want to update and then run the update command on those filtered projects. It looks like this:

Get-Project -All | Where-Object { $_.Name -ne "Autofac" -and $_.Name -ne "Autofac.Tests" } | ForEach-Object { Update-Package -Id "Autofac" -ProjectName $_.Name -Version "3.5.0-CI-114" -IncludePrerelease -Source "Autofac MyGet" }

In that little script…

• Get-Project -All gets the entire list of projects in the current loaded solution.
• The Where-Object is where you filter out the stuff you don’t want upgraded. I don’t want to run the Autofac upgrade on Autofac itself, but I could also add other projects.
• The ForEach-Object runs the package update for each selected project.
  • The -Version parameter is the build from our MyGet feed that I want to try out.
  • The -Source parameter is the NuGet source name I’ve added for our MyGet feed.

You might see a couple of errors go by if you don’t filter out the update for a project that doesn’t have a reference to the thing you’re updating (e.g., if you try to update Autofac in a project that doesn’t have an Autofac reference) but that’s OK.

James Chambers has a great roundup of some additional helpful NuGet PowerShell script samples. Definitely something to keep handy.