I have a .Net project which is largely developed on a Mac using Visual Studio Code and deployed to an Azure Web App service using Azure DevOps Pipelines.

This works pretty well, though occasionally a pipeline fails because of a timeout, and works next time round.

Recently though I made some changes including upgrading to .Net 10 and migrating to Central Package Management (CPM). CPM is to my mind a great feature though seemingly little used. It means that package versions are defined in a single file at the root of the solution, and applied to all projects. Package versions are no longer specified in the individual .csproj project files. It means you have consistent package versions and simplifies upgrades. If for some compatibility reason you need different versions, there are ways to override CPM.

Everything worked fine in development but the pipeline no longer worked. The pipeline runs on Ubuntu and failed with the error:

NU1015: The following PackageReference item(s) do not have a version specified

for all the Nuget packages in the solution.

I loaded the solution in Visual Studio 2026 and everything worked fine there. I resorted to using the Visual Studio publish tool instead of the pipeline as a workaround. The pipeline works better for me though, as it runs automatically on all commits, running a suite of tests before actually deploying, and lets me work entirely on a Mac.

I made a bug report and got some well-intended advice that did not fix the problem.

Then, scrutinising the project one more time, I noticed that the documented name for the critical file that enables CPM is Directory.Packages.props – whereas I had Directory.Packages.Props.

This worked fine on Windows and Mac which are mostly not case-sensitive file systems, but not on Ubuntu. I am not sure why I typed it wrong though I’ve noticed looking around that there are other references to using Directory.Packages.Props so I am not the only one.

After that I just had to figure out how to change the case of the filename on GitHub (temporarily set the config to core.ignorecase false) and everything worked.

PS: I am not sure why Visual Studio 2026 does not provide any UI for setting Central Package Management. This is likely a major reason why it is little used.