NuGet does have a local file cache but recent packages are not necessarily cached. They are just a list of packages you have installed recently. You could have cleared them from the cache for example. Also I suspect the recent packages list will still go out to the online feed if we are using HasProjectContent(). If you switch to using http://nuget.org/api/v2/ instead of https://nuget.org/api/v2/ you can see the requests using Fiddler.