Automatically create list of nuget packages and licenses

Question

Is there any way to get an automatically updated list of all used nuget packages in my solution, including a link to the corresponding license, which I can display within my app?

Running the following from Package Manager Console within Visual Studio gives me the required information:

Get-Project | Get-Package | select Id, Version, LicenseUrl 

How to get this list a) automatically updated on each change and b) get it into my app?

Target is to have an Info/About dialog showing all this data.

Answer 1

I found one way, pretty sure it has some limitations...

I'm calling this in the pre-build event:

powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File $(ProjectDir)\Resources\tools\PreBuildScript.ps1  $(ProjectDir) $(SolutionDir) $(TargetDir)

And here is how resources\tools\PreBuildScript.ps1 looks like:

param (
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$True)]
    [string]$ProjectDir,
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$True)]
    [string]$SolutionDir,
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$True)]
    [string]$TargetDir
)
[Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName('System.IO.Compression.FileSystem')
$nupkgs = Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Filter *.nupkg -Path "$SolutionDir\packages" 
$nuspecs = $nupkgs | %{ [IO.Compression.ZipFile]::OpenRead($_.FullName).Entries | where {$_.Fullname.EndsWith('.nuspec')} } 
$metadata = $nuspecs | %{ 
    ([xml]([System.IO.StreamReader]$_.Open()).ReadToEnd()) | %{New-Object PSObject -Property @{
        Version = $_.package.metadata.version
        Authors = $_.package.metadata.authors 
        Title =  IF ([string]::IsNullOrWhitespace($_.package.metadata.title)){$_.package.metadata.id} else {$_.package.metadata.title}
        LicenseUrl  = $_.package.metadata.licenseUrl
    }}
} 
$metadata | %{ '{0} {1}{4}Autor(en): {2}{4}Lizenz: {3}{4}{4}' -f $_.Title, $_.Version, $_.Authors, $_.LicenseUrl, [Environment]::NewLine } | Out-File "$ProjectDir\Resources\ThirdPartyLicenseOverview.txt"

This gives me an (ugly) textfile Resources\ThirdPartyLicenseOverview.txt that I can include as embedded resource to use it within my app.

Not the final solution but one step on the way...