Just as in the rest of the project, we use Bazel as our build system. This means that you can take advantage of a hermetic build environment, and know that your build will work on both macOS and Linux, as well as Windows. However, this does come at the cost of being a little unusual to work with.

Before opening the VS Studio project, the first thing to do is to build everything you might need using Bazel. To do this: bazel build dotnet/... This first build may take a while, as it will download a bunch of required files. Make sure you've got a good Internet connection too!

We use paket to manage our dependencies. In order to manage them, first cd into the dotnet directory, and make sure you have paket installed:

dotnet new tool-manifest
dotnet tool install paket
dotnet tool restore

This should be a one-time step. Once complete, edit the //dotnet:paket.dependencies file to add or update the deps you need. Next, from the root of the project (in the directory where the WORKSPACE file is), run ./dotnet/update-deps.sh. This should execute successfully and will update both the paket.lock and paket.bzl files. Once this is done, commit the changes, and you'll be able to use the files in your build.