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:

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.