quozd/awesome-dotnet

Awesome .NET!

A collection of awesome .NET libraries, tools, frameworks, and software.

Inspired by awesome-ruby, awesome-php, awesome-python, frontend-dev-bookmarks and ruby-bookmarks.

Contributions are always welcome! Please take a look at the contribution guidelines and quality standard pages first.

Thanks to all contributors, you're awesome and wouldn't be possible without you! The goal is to build a categorized community-driven collection of very well-known resources.

API

Frameworks
- ASP.NET WebAPI - Framework that makes it easy to build HTTP services that reach a broad range of clients, including browsers and mobile devices
- ServiceStack - Thoughtfully architected, obscenely fast, thoroughly enjoyable web services for all
WebAPI Contrib - Collection of open source projects to help improve your work with ASP.NET Web API

Application Frameworks

ASP.NET Boilerplate - A starting point for new modern ASP.NET MVC web applications with best practices and most popular tools.

Assets

Cassette - Manages .NET web application assets (scripts, css and templates)
NodeAssets - Asset Manager for .net that has live css updates using SignalR and can optionally leverage NodeJS compilers
Bundler - Compile & Minify Less/Sass/Stylus/Css/JS/CoffeeScript/LiveScript files. Integrates with MVC and ServiceStack
SquishIt - Lets you easily bundle some css and javascript

Authentication and Authorization

ASP.NET Identity - New membership system for ASP.NET applications
DotNetOpenAuth - A C# implementation of the OpenID, OAuth and InfoCard protocols
Thinktecture IdentityModel - Helper library for identity & access control in .NET 4.5 and MVC4/Web API.
OAuth - A very lightweight library for generating OAuth 1.0a signatures written in C#

Build Automation

Psake - .NET-based build automation tool written in PowerShell
FAKE - F# Make, a cross platform build automation system
Invoke-Build - PowerShell build and test automation tool inspired by Psake.

Caching

CacheCow - An ASP.NET Web API HTTP caching implementation both on client and server

CLI

Command Line Parser - The Command Line Parser Library offers to CLR applications a clean and concise API for manipulating command line arguments and related tasks
Power Args - PowerArgs converts command line arguments into .NET objects that are easy to program against. It also provides a ton of optional capabilities such as argument validation, auto generated usage, tab completion, and plenty of extensibility

CMS

Umbraco - Umbraco is a free open source Content Management System built on the ASP.NET platform
Composite C1 - A web CMS that focus on UX and adaptability
Orchard - Free, open source, community-focused project aimed at delivering applications and reusable components on the ASP.NET platform
mojoPortal - MojoPortal is an extensible, cross database, mobile friendly, web content management system (CMS) and web application framework written in C# ASP.NET

Code Analysis and Metrics

StyleCop - StyleCop analyzes C# source code to enforce a set of style and consistency rules
Gendarme - Extensible rule-based tool to find problems in .NET applications and libraries
Metrics-Net - Capturing CLR and application-level metrics. So you know what's going on.

Continuous Integration

TeamCity - Ready to work, extensible and developer-friendly build server — out of the box

Cryptography

HashLib - HashLib is a collection of nearly all hash algorithms you've ever seen, it supports almost everything and is very easy to use

Database

BrightstarDb - BrightstarDB is a native .NET RDF triple store

Database Drivers

MySQL Connector - Connector/Net is a fully-managed ADO.NET driver for MySQL
Npgsql - .Net data provider for Postgresql
Mongo csharp driver
ServiceStack Redis - .NET's leading C# Redis Client
StackExchange Redis - General purpose redis client from StackExchange

DirectX

SlimDX - DirectX framework wrapper for .NET applications

Documentation

Sandcastle - Sandcastle Help File Builder similar to NDoc
SharpDox - A c# documentation tool

E-Commerce and Payments

Paypal Merchant SDK - Official Paypal Merchant SDK for .NET
ServiceStack.Stripe - yped .NET clients for stripe.com REST APIs
Stripe.Net - Stripe.net is a full service .net api for http://stripe.com.

Environment Management

Git Tools

LibGit2Sharp - LibGit2Sharp brings all the might and speed of libgit2, a native Git implementation, to the managed world of .Net and Mono.

Graphics

Oxyplot - OxyPlot is a cross-platform plotting library for .NET

GUI

MahApps.Metro - Toolkit for creating Metro styled WPF apps
Callisto - A control toolkit for Windows 8 XAML applications. Contains some UI controls to make it easier to create Windows UI style apps for the Windows Store in accordance with Windows UI guidelines.
ObjectListView - ObjectListView is a C# wrapper around a .NET ListView. It makes the ListView much easier to use and teaches it some new tricks
DockPanelSuite - The Visual Studio inspired docking library for .NET WinForms

HTTP

RestSharp - Simple REST and HTTP API Client for .NET
EasyHttp - Http Library for C#

IDE

SharpDevelop - A free IDE for .NET programming languages
MonoDevelop - MonoDevelop is a cross platform IDE mostly aimed at Mono/.NET developers
Visual Studio Express - The free lightweight version of Visual Studio for .NET programming.

Image Processing

ImageResizer - Add commands to image URLs to get altered versions in milliseconds. Resizing, editing etc of images in real-time.
ImageProcessor - Open-source .NET library to manipulate images on-the-fly.

Install tools

Wix Toolset - The most powerful set of tools available to create your Windows installation experience

Internationalization

i18n - Smart internationalization for ASP.NET MVC

IoC

Castle Windsor - Castle Windsor is best of breed, mature Inversion of Control container available for .NET and Silverlight
Unity - Lightweight extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection
Autofac - An addictive .NET IoC container
Ninject - The ninja of .net dependency injectors
StructureMap - The original IoC/DI Container for .Net
Spring.Net - Spring.NET is an open source application framework that makes building enterprise .NET applications easier

Logging

Essential Diagnostics - Extends the inbuilt features of System.Diagnostics namespace to provide flexible logging
NLog - NLog - Advanced .NET and Silverlight Logging
ELMAH - Official ELMAH site
Elmah MVC - Elmah for MVC
Log4Net - The Apache log4net library is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets
Serilog - A no-nonsense logging library for the NoSQL era. Combines the best of traditional and structured diagnostic logging in an easy-to-use package.
StackExchange.Exceptional - Error handler used for the Stack Exchange network
Semantic Logging Application Block (SLAB) - Extends the inbuilt features of System.Diagnostics.Tracing namespace (EventSource class) to log to several sinks including Azure Tables, Databases, files (JSON, XML, text). Supports in-process and out-of-process logging through ETW, and Rx for real-time filtering/aggregating of events.

Markdown Processors

MarkdownSharp - Open source C# implementation of Markdown processor, as featured on Stack Overflow.

Mail

FluentEmail - A Fluent Wrapper for System.Net.Mail with razor templating support.
MailKit - A complete cross-platform mail stack including IMAP, POP3, SMTP, authentication and more. Built on top of MimeKit.
MimeKit - A cross-platform .NET MIME creation and parser library with support for S/MIME, PGP, TNEF and Unix mbox spools.

Metrics

C# StatsD Client - C# client for Etsy's StatsD

Misc

AzureCrawler - Take HTML Snapshots for your Angular, Ember, Durandal or any JavaScript applications
LINQPad - a C#/VB/F# scratchpad that instantly executes any expression, statement block or program with rich output formatting and a wealth of features. Also lets you interactively query databases in LINQ.
.NET Fiddle - Write, compile and run C# code in the browser. The C# equivalent of JSFiddle.
Humanizer - Humanizer meets all your .NET needs for manipulating and displaying strings, enums, dates, times, timespans, numbers and quantities
ScriptCS - Write C# apps with a text editor, nuget and the power of Roslyn!
CSScript - CS-Script is a CLR based scripting system which usesC# as a programming language. CS-Script currently targets Microsoft implementation of CLR (.NET 2.0/3.0/3.5/4.0/4.5) with full support on Mono. Comes with many additional features, such as script hosting.
Mono.Cecil - Cecil is a library to generate and inspect programs and libraries in the ECMA CIL form.

MVVM

Caliburn.Micro - A small, yet powerful framework, designed for building applications across all XAML platforms. Its strong support for MV* patterns will enable you to build your solution quickly, without the need to sacrifice code quality or testability.
MVVM Light Toolkit - The main purpose of the toolkit is to accelerate the creation and development of MVVM applications in WPF, Silverlight, Windows Store (RT) and for Windows Phone
Catel - Catel is an application development platform with the focus on MVVM (WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone and WinRT) and MVC (ASP.NET MVC). The core of Catel contains an IoC container, models, validation, memento, message mediator, argument checking, etc.
UpdateControls - Update Controls does not require that you implement INotifyPropertyChanged or declare a DependencyProperty. It connects controls directly to CLR properties. This makes it perfect for the Model/View/ViewModel pattern.
ReactiveUI - An MVVM framework for .NET that integrates the Reactive Extensions (Rx) framework, enabling developers to build elegant, testable applications using WPF, Windows Store Apps, WP8 or Xamarin.

Office

ClosedXML - ClosedXML makes it easier for developers to create Excel 2007/2010 files

ORM

Entity Framework - Object-relational mapper that enables .NET developers to work with relational data using domain-specific objects
BL Toolkit - Business Logic Toolkit for .NET
Dapper
Dapper Extensions - Small library that complements Dapper by adding basic CRUD operations (Get, Insert, Update, Delete) for your POCOs
NHibernate - NHibernate Object Relational Mapper
FluentMigrator - Fluent Migrations framework for .net
ServiceStack.OrmLite - Light, simple and fast convention-based POCO ORM
Massive - A small, happy, data access tool that will love you forever.

Package Management

NuGet - THE .NET Package Manager
OpenWrap - OpenWrap Package Manager

PDF

ITextSharp - iText is a PDF library that allows you to CREATE, ADAPT, INSPECT and MAINTAIN documents in the Portable Document Format (PDF)

Profiler

MiniProfiler - A simple but effective mini-profiler for ASP.NET websites
Glimpse - The open source diagnostics platform for the web

Queue

NServiceBus - The most popular service bus for .NET
Hangfire - Incredibly easy way to perform fire-and-forget, delayed and recurring tasks inside ASP.NET applications
RabbitMQ.NET - Implementation of an AMQP client library for C#, and a binding exposing AMQP services via WCF
NetMQ - NetMQ is 100% native C# port of ZeroMQ
MassTransit - MassTransit is lean service bus implementation for building loosely coupled applications using the .NET Framework.
[Rebus] (https://github.com/rebus-org/Rebus) - Rebus is a lean service bus implementation for .NET, similar in nature to NServiceBus and MassTransit, only leaner

Scheduling

QuartzNet - Quartz Enterprise Scheduler .NET

SDK and API Clients

AWS SDK - The AWS SDK for .NET enables .NET developers to easily work with Amazon Web Services
Azure SDK Tools - A set of PowerShell cmdlets for developers and administrators to develop, deploy and manage Microsoft Azure applications
Octokit.NET - A GitHub API client library for .NET
DropNet - Client Library for the Dropbox API

Search

Elasticsearch .NET - Elasticsearch.Net & NEST
PlainElastic.Net - Plain .Net client for ElasticSearch
SolrNet - Solr client for .Net

Serialization

Protobuf.NET - Protocol buffers is the name of the binary serialization format used by Google for much of their data communications
Json.NET - Popular high-performance JSON framework for .NET
ServiceStack.Text - JSON, JSV and CSV Text Serializers used in servicestack.net
Msgpack-Cli - MessagePack implementation for Common Language Infrastructure
Jil - Fast .NET JSON Serializer, built on Sigil (used by StackOverflow)
ProtoBuf - Generate C# code for protocol buffer serialization from a .proto specification.

State machines

Stateless - Create state machines and lightweight state machine-based workflows directly in .NET code

Style Guide

C# Style Guide - StackOverflow Q & A on style guides
C# Coding Conventions - Official MSDN C# code conventions

Template Engine

RazorEngine - Open source templating engine based on Microsoft's Razor parsing engine

Testing

NUnit
xUnit - xUnit.net is a free, open source, community-focused unit testing tool for the .NET Framework
SpecFlow - Binding business requirements to .Net code
AutoFixture - AutoFixture is an open source framework for .NET designed to minimize the 'Arrange' phase of your unit tests
Moq - The most popular and friendly mocking framework for .NET
Machine.Specifications - Machine.Specifications (MSpec) is a context/specification framework that removes language noise and simplifies tests.
Rhino Mocks - Dynamic Mocking Framework for .NET
Fluent Assertions - A set of .NET extension methods that allow you to more naturally specify the expected outcome of a TDD or BDD-style test
NSubstitute - A friendly substitute for .NET mocking frameworks

Visual Studio Plugins

Web Essentials - Web Essentials extends Visual Studio with lots of new features that web developers have been missing for many years
VsVIM - VIM in Visual Studio
Nuget Package Manager - NuGet is the package manager for the Microsoft development platform including .NET
SideWaffle - A collection of Item Templates for Visual Studio 2012/2013 that makes any web developer's life much easier
Resharper - Developer Productivity Tool for Visual Studio (Commercial)

Web Frameworks

ASP.NET MVC - ASP.NET is a free web framework for building great web sites and applications
NancyFx - Lightweight, low-ceremony, framework for building HTTP based services on .Net and Mono
IISNode - Host NodeJS applications in IIS

Web Servers

EmbedIO - Web server built on Mono and cross-platform

WebSocket

SignalR - Library for ASP.NET developers that makes it incredibly simple to add real-time web functionality to your applications
Fleck - Fleck is a WebSocket server implementation in C#. Branched from the Nugget project
Websocket-Sharp - A C# implementation of the WebSocket protocol client and server
XSockets - Provides a great set of tools for you to build real-time applications on the Microsoft.NET plattform and much more

Windows Services

TopShelf - An easy service hosting framework for building Windows services using .NET