Oh Concierge, can you NuGet me [a related package recommendation?]... Hello NuGet Concierge...

NuGet blog - Introducing NuGet Concierge

Twelve weeks ago, Microsoft’s Azure Applications Platform & Tools team welcomed three 2nd-year college students, Jaspreet Bagga, Jeremiah Jekich, and Melissa McNeill, and gave them an opportunity to contribute to NuGet.

Package Discovery

Discovering NuGet packages can be a daunting process. The best way to do so is either via word of mouth or online search. However, your friends aren’t always available when you’re looking for a new package at 3:00 in the morning. You could try to search online, but you’d need to spend unnecessary amounts of time sifting through the results before finding a package that may be helpful. We recognize that this time is better spent actually developing software. We wanted to create an accessible service to deliver package recommendations using real world data about how developers use packages.

NuGet Concierge

Thus was born NuGet Concierge, a package recommendation service that recommends packages to developers based on the packages currently being used in their project. We envisioned developers being able to upload their project’s packages.config file to the NuGet Concierge website, which would then present them with a list of packages they may find useful. Something along the lines of “Most projects that use Package A also use Package B.”

So, at the beginning of the summer, we put out a call to the community via Twitter, asking for developers to upload their projects’ packages.config files to help seed our newly conceived recommendation service. We asked, and you delivered! Armed with a collection of over 350 packages.config files, the NuGet Concierge project was brought to life.

Implementation

The first step was to translate the collected .config files into a structure that would allow us to analyze the relationships between packages. How often are individual packages used? But, more importantly, how are packages used together?

So, we took the community’s .config files and parsed them, using them to construct a graph. In doing so, we tracked the number of times a package was used, a value we referred to as the package’s “popularity.” We also tracked how many times two packages were used together, which we referred to as the packages’ “pairing frequency.”

Determining Relationships

Let’s say we have two packages, EntityFramework and jQuery...

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NuGet Concierge’s Potential

NuGet Concierge is just a conceptual prototype at the moment. But if the concept proves to be valuable, we imagine NuGet Concierge as a fully integrated part of NuGet, having a presence in the Gallery, Visual Studio’s Manage NuGet Packages dialog, and the Package Manager Console. The greatest part of NuGet Concierge is the data powering it. The ability to reference real data about how packages are actively used together opens up a world of opportunities that can potentially help NuGet better serve developers.

Until then, please feel free to try out NuGet Concierge at http://concierge.nuget.org and let us know if you like the concept and/or the recommendations. You can also see the code for NuGet Concierge at http://github.com/NuGet/Concierge.

Interesting... But more, I love how it's OSS.