How to find a class in a list of Nuget packages

Question

My team is using more and more NuGet packages as a way to break the system into smaller pieces and share things between parts. We have adopted a sort of SRP principle for packaging, creating small and hopefully cohesive packages that do just one thing (logging, auditing, security stuff, etc).

Ideally they should be so cohesive and self-contained that it would be straightforward to know what package will contain what you need. However we are not yet there and sometimes is difficult to know what package you should add to access some functionality.

My question is: is there any way to publish and navigate package content information? Like, for instance, in MSDN you can see what assembly contains a class. Would it be possible to know something like that, at the package level?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The closest functionality I can think of is implemented in ReSharper. However it can only search the packages in nuget.org(closed issue on GitHub). Since packages don't expose type info, JetBrains built a custom index and that's the only data source it can query.

Answer 2

It's a very localised version, but there is a package searcher for the ASP.NET 5 packages hosted on NuGet. It might be possible to host a version that looks at a wider scope at some point.

https://packagesearch.azurewebsites.net/