Here's the proposed feature for 2.8 to allow NuGet to work with the cases where people store multiple projects in the same directory.
Problem:
Some people like to store multiple projects in the same directory, which poses a problem with the current model because they can't have different packages.config files.
Solution:
If the project contains packages.<project name>.config, we will use it to load packages and store new packages.
Otherwise, continue to use packages.config.
Users are required to manually rename it to packages.<project name>.config. There’s no support from NuGet.
Project name normalization:
To avoid potential bugs, NuGet will replace spaces in project name with underscores before looking up the config file.