I've been a .Net developer for 12 years now, and I feel very senior with almost all aspects of creating, debugging, and deploying applications that I've come across. But any time I run into a reference issue, I feel like I'm a brand new developer, and it takes me at least a day to get back on track...

I am pretty comfortable using NuGet, and I can usually get things sorted out pretty quickly when packages are added through that. But when they aren't, I have basically 0 clue as to how things are actually linked and loaded.

I see all this stuff about "Copy Local", path hints in the project file, version numbers in the web.config, and if it's a global assembly or not, but none of it makes sense to me. I guess I'm looking for something that just describes best practices and maybe good steps to troubleshooting and cleaning up issues. I just hate wasting time on that sort of thing, since it's not productive or interesting work.

For example / rant, the software I work in (I'm the only developer) uses an older version of Crystal Reports. I created a new branch to start working on a new report, and decided to delete the existing references, and just add them through NuGet to get newer versions and clean things up. Took me a little bit of fumbling around to make sure all the projects were synced up, but it wasn't a huge issue. I was having issues testing the old reports, so I went to revert back to the old Crystal Reports, but it was bitching about not finding that version... I decided to switch back to my (unchanged) develop branch, and still the same issues! It's like there were missing references that maybe weren't tracked or something? I had to manually set the version in the project file just to get it back to the way it was. /rant

Even though that problem is solved (for now), I feel like I'm missing something basic with understanding how to manage this stuff.