I'm looking for suggestions on how best to share VS projects across Team projects in TFS (currently 2013 on-prem, but will soon upgrade to 2017 or VSTS). Our primary use case is for Request/Response models for Web API projects, but we've recently started trying to share more utility code and custom parsers across our development teams as well.
In our current setup we're using self-hosted NuGet packages, but this is a manual process and error prone. It also holds us back from moving to VSTS because Package Management isn't included in the Basic tier.
We could probably reduce the dependency on shared models by using Swagger to document our APIs, but that seems like a cop out.
Any suggestions?
It's not suggested to reference projects outside your solution root. You should make a project reference or create a NuGet package.
Since your projects are across Team projects, Nuget package is still the recommended option. In VSTS and TFS 2017, you can host your NuGet packages using Package Management feeds. Check: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/package/overview.