Hi, thanks for sharing this issue.

Since V1, NCrunch has deliberately disabled Nuget package restore for its own builds. Because Nuget was previously performing this via a custom build target, the approach taken here was simply to remove the build target. This was done because the auto package restore was kicking in for each individual workspace, causing the references to be downloaded again and again, which is very inefficient. This means that you would need to perform a Visual Studio build against a solution before you could run NCrunch on it, to make sure that all the packages were restored before NCrunch would begin processing.

If I understand the new package restore method correctly, the same situation applies. NCrunch won't restore the packages automatically so it is dependent on you performing a manual build in Visual Studio first. One point of difference that may now exist is around NCrunch's synchronisation with these references. Previously, Nuget was probably touching the project file triggering NCrunch to reload projects after the references were restored. It's likely that this is no longer the case, so you'll need to reset the NCrunch engine after the packages have been restored. This will cause the engine to resync and detect the newly restored references.

Does this match your experience with package restore?