Invoke the Manage NuGet Packages dialog programmatically

Luan Nguyen

Recently I’ve been asked several times for how to invoke the Manage NuGet Packages dialog from VS components programmatically, and optionally auto-invoke the search when the dialog opens. Today I’d like to share the solution in this post.

It’s actually very straightforward. The Manage NuGet Packages menu command is registered as a standard VS command, thus you can call DTE.ExecuteCommand() to invoke it. The trick is to know the command name, which is Project.ManageNuGetPackages. Here’s a code sample:

DTE dte = (DTE)GetService(typeof(SDTE)); 
dte.ExecuteCommand("Project.ManageNuGetPackages");

Note that it will open the project-level dialog. To open the solution-level dialog instead, you replace the command name with Tools.ManageNuGetPackagesforSolution.

The ExecuteCommand() method also accepts a second optional parameter of string type. If you pass a string value to it, the NuGet command handler will intepret it as a search query and will automatically issue a search request after it has opened the dialog.

DTE dte = (DTE)GetService(typeof(SDTE)); 
dte.ExecuteCommand("Project.ManageNuGetPackages", "jQuery");

With the above code, assuming you have the Online tab selected the last time you closed it, you will see this:

Dialog opened with search query

If, for some reason, you don’t like to call through DTE, you can also invoke the command directly through the OleMenuCommandService service.

var nugetCommandGuid = Guid.Parse("25fd982b-8cae-4cbd-a440-e03ffccde106"); 
var nugetCommand = new CommandID(nugetCommandGuid, 0x100); 

// 0x100 is the command id for project-level dialog 
OleMenuCommandService mcs = GetService(typeof(IMenuCommandService)) as OleMenuCommandService; 
mcs.GlobalInvoke(nugetCommand, "jQuery");

Again, to open the solution-level dialog, you set the command id to 0x200. These constants are set in the NuGet source code.

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