SoftEaster

Eric Nelson, a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft and Technical Editor of MSDN UK Flash, has compiled a list of 23 .NET “Open Source Frameworks and Libraries” mostly based on recommendations sent by UK developers.

Eric have tried to strike a balance between some fairly well known projects and some lesser known but equally well respected offerings.

1. [TEST] xUnit.net - One of several very good testing frameworks to aid with TDD.
2. [TEST] RhinoMocks mocking framework – Ease testing by allowing the developer to create mock implementations of objects.
3. [TEST] White for automation of Windows applications – Programmatically drive Windows applications.
4. [TEST] Gallio Automation Platform – Works with many testing frameworks including MSTest, xUnit, NUnit and MbUnit.
5. [DATA] Fluent NHibernate – Fluent NHibernate lets you write mappings in strongly typed C# code.
6. [OOP] StructureMap Dependency Injection/Inversion of Control - Enable looser coupling between classes and their dependencies.
7. [OOP] Managed Extensibility Framework – Make the shift from applications being statically compiled to dynamically composed.
8. [APPFX] s#arp architecture for web applications – Foundation for rapidly building web applications using ASP.NET MVC with NHibernate.
9. [APPFX] OpenRasta REST based framework for building web applications – Simplify exposing a REST based API to your application.
10. [APPFX] CSLA.NET Application Framework – A comprehensive framework for .NET development.
11. [APPFX] Spring.NET Application Framework – A comprehensive framework for building web applications.
12. [RUNTIME] Mono enables .NET on Linux and Mac – Use those .NET skills to target Linux, BSD and OS X.
13. [UTIL] Sandcastle Help File Builder – Create MSDN-style documentation from .NET assemblies.
14. [HELPER] EasyHook for Windows API Hooking – Extend unmanaged code (APIs) with managed code.
15. [HELPER] Json.NET for working with JSON formatted data – R/W using the JsonReader and JsonWriter or serialize your .NET objects with a single call.
16. [HELPER] Excel Data Reader for Excel 97 to 2007 – Read Excel files straight into a dataset.
17. [HELPER] #SNMP Library – A natural API interface to encapsulate SNMP functions.
18. [HELPER] DotNetZip Library – A great ZIP library plus samples.
19. [HELPER] Visio Automation Library – Automate Visio from C#, Visual Basic and more.
20. [HELPER] PHPExcel is not just about Excel! – PHP classes to r/w Excel 2007, PDF, HTML and more.
21. [HELPER] Argotic Syndication Framework for RSS, Atom, OPML and more – Makes the reading and writing syndicated content in common formats very easy.
22. [HELPER] NLog logging library – Easily write diagnostic traces from your application.
23. A great directory of C# Open Source software – Nicely indexed directory of libraries, frameworks and tools.