Excluding development dependencies when creating packages
Some NuGet packages are useful as development dependencies, which help you author your own library, but aren't necessarily needed as actual package dependencies. Some examples are code-based packages or tooling packages that don't provide assemblies your package needs to reference at runtime. Starting from version 2.7, the pack command will ignore <package> entries in the packages.config file which have an attribute developmentDependency set to true and will not include that package as a dependency in the created package. For example, consider the following packages.config file in the source project:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<packages>
<package id="jQuery" version="1.5.2" />
<package id="netfx-Guard" version="1.3.3.2" developmentDependency="true" />
<package id="microsoft-web-helpers" version="1.15" />
</packages>
When running the pack command on this project, the created package will have a dependency on jQuery and microsoft-web-helpers, but will not have dependency on netfx-Guard.