Visual Studio 2015 Community not showing all avaliable bower-packages correctly

[DMW007]

material-design-icons-iconfont is a valid bower-package. But when I click manage bower packages in Visual Studio and search for that package, I only get the result that no packages are found. Even with checking the checkbox for pre-releases.

So I edited the bower.json by myself and added the following line in the dependencies-section:

"material-design-icons-iconfont": "2.0.4"

After that, I used the restore-package function from Visual Studio. The result of them is even stranger: The bower-package seems installed correctly, I got the font and css files of the package under wwwroot/lib. But: The package is NOT listed in the dependencies of the solution-explorer, and also the manage-section of bower-packages doesn't list it as installed.

The Bower-Manager as a clone of the NuGet-Manager is a very good approach, but with those bugs its unfortunately very unuseable. And it seems, that I'm not alone with those issues. Here someone describe the same issue already last year!

I'm using Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3.

[craigbroadman]

+1

[mlorbetske]

@jodavis ideas?

[jodavis]

The "Manage Bower Packages" UI is currently limited to displaying packages that are in a built-in registry of the top 1000 packages. We are making improvements to that in Dev15.

However, it should show up under the Dependencies node in Solution Explorer. @DMWOO7, can you confirm it is completely installed, including the .bower.json that should be generated in the package folder? (Note the leading dot in the filename.)

[Witchfinder]

@jodavis I am seeing similar behaviour with pixi.js - Pixi is now on version 4.0.0, and the version that the Bower Package manager is seeing is the same one that Nuget offers (ie: way back to 1.3.0). The one I am using doesn't show up in the bower package manager.

The bower_components folder is up to date, and everything is indeed there, including .bower.json in the bower_components/pixi.js folder - only I see no dependencies tree in the project.

[jodavis]

@Witchfinder What type of project are you using? The Dependencies node only shows up in ASP.NET Core or Cordova projects. It doesn't work for ASP.NET 4.x projects.

In an ASP.NET Core project, the Dependencies node should always appear. The Bower node should appear under that as long as there is a bower.json or bower_components folder. (A .bowerrc file could reconfigure the bower_components to a different folder, e.g. wwwroot\lib). Are you saying the Dependencies and Bower nodes are missing, or just the pixi.js package underneath the Bower node?

[Witchfinder]

@jodavis The project is actually an ASP.NET 4.x SignalR project. I'm not sure why that ought to make any difference though. Yes, maybe it does make a difference, but it shouldn't.

Can the project be updated? Ultimately, it's not a huge problem, it's just annoying managing the packages and dependencies separately.

[jodavis]

@Witchfinder Supporting the Dependencies node outside of ASP.NET Core projects is on our backlog. I agree it shouldn't make a difference, but the two project systems are built on completely different technologies, and we put our resources on ASP.NET Core where there was no alternative to using Bower and npm for package management. (ASP.NET 4.x can use Nuget to acquire client-side packages.)

Converting a project from ASP.NET 4.x to ASP.NET Core is not always a straightforward process. In particular, SignalR support was not available in ASP.NET Core 1.0. So that's probably not an option for you.