Say you have a ‘large project’ (think: clean architecture) with 40+ projects that has gradually evolved over time, has been refactored etc. There may be unused references lying around.
How do we get unused references?
There are many ways this happens accidentally, for example:
In the beginning, there was a Test project, which references Moq (a popular mocking library):
Say we decide to split the projects up. The 2nd Test project also requires a dependency on Moq, but also uses a base class in Test. We now have this situation:
Now, say that we move all mocks to OtherTests but we forget to remove the Moq nuget from Test. It s still referenced, but no longer used:
Remove unused references – The naive Way
Visual Studio has a feature to Remove Unused References:
Since transitive dependencies are a thing, the order in which you do this is important.
Remove unused references – The easy way
From Finding .NET Transitive Dependencies and Tidying Up Your Project, use Snitch: spectresystems/snitch: A tool that help you find duplicate transitive package references.
