What are the most relevant OSS projects for .NET?

Question

Not a popularity contest, but if you were to elect some in some categories, what would be the names?

Here are a few suggested categories.

The only criteria I’d insist on would be: needs to be fully OSS, not a one-man show, have some people involved, have source available and with a well-know open source license (hopefully with no distinction between commercial and other uses)

• Blog engines
• Wikis
• Web frameworks
• WPF frameworks
• Silverlight frameworks
• Unit test frameworks (including spec?)
• ASP.Net tools
• more specialized frameworks

Scott Hanselman and Hamilton Verissimo de Oliveira

Answer 1

The mono project.

Answer 2

Persistence: NHibernate

IOC: Castle Windsor, StructureMap

MVC: Castle MonoRail

Testing: NUnit

Answer 3

Another category would be ORM with SubSonic(Mozilla Pulic License) and NHibernate(LGPL) in there.

Answer 4

Watin and Nunit to unit testing frameworks

Answer 5

CMS/Web Framework: dotnetNuke

Answer 6

Blog: BlogEngine.NET

Answer 7

Building frameworks: Nant.

Answer 8

The SubSonic project.

Answer 9

Wiki: ScrewTurn Wiki

Jeff liked it so much he tried to donate to it, but they've apparently not even needed the money yet.

I've used it for about a year now on my development team to document tasks and so forth (i.e., what software do I have to have to do a full build today?, etc.) and it's been great.

Answer 10

I'd say the testing frameworks, NUnit, MB-Unit, and xUnit.net

SubText, dasBlog, dotNetNuke

Mono

MonoRail

jQuery

The IoC/DI frameworks - Ninject, StructureMap, Castle Windsor

Answer 11

jQuery

Answer 12

Hi! this is not a vote, we just want to make sure we get the names/links to all important ones, so we dont miss any. :-)

Answer 13

The most relevant ones to me are the ones I use the most and are the most valuable to me I suppose.

Unit Testing Frameworks:

• NUnit
• MbUnit

Mocking Frameworks:

• Rhino.Mocks
  • You could argue Oren Eini is a one man show, but he does take contributions :)
• Moq

IoC Frameworks:

• Castle Windsor
• StructureMap

Blog Engines:

• dasBlog
• SubText
• BlogEngine.NET

Other:

• Witty (Twitter client)

Answer 14

+1 NHibernate

Answer 15

AnkhSVN - Great Tool for Visual Studio, completely done in .NET

Answer 16

For me: Umbraco, SubSonic and I'm liking Gaiaware RAD Ajax widgets

Answer 17

Follow up on AnkhSVN: SharpSvn, the library used by AnkhSVN to talk to Subversion

Answer 18

ASP.NET:
AjaxControlToolkit (MS-PL)
Allows community contributions, has a large team on CodePlex.

Languages:
IronRuby (MS-PL)
Allows community contributions, source code hosted at RubyForge.

Answer 19

Virtual Earth JavaScript Intellisense Helper

Answer 20

DotNetKicks

Answer 21

FlickrNET API

Paint.NET

Answer 22

Script# is one of my favs

Answer 23

log4Net

Usually the first dependency I add to every .Net project I do.

Answer 24

Most relevant?? For today MbUnit, RhinoMocks, Castle, NLog/Log4net, NHibernate, Nant. Those would be included in just about any of my Enterprise apps.

Answer 25

Mono - the libs not the runtime and compilers including: Cecil, Mono Addins, and others unique to Mono GTK#

Castle - all of it

log4net nlog

Rhino-tools - all of ‘em

NHibernate (implied by above)

Boo - the extensible compiler is awesome.

MonoRocks - Mono inspired extension method library.

Ninject - because CF and Silverlight need IOCC love too.

NUnit & MbUnit

MonoDevelop

SharpDevelop

gnome-do - launchy/quicksilver for gnome.

boxerp - interesting databinding and enterprise application helper library

dasblog

subtext

C5 - because the BCL collection library is pathetic.

FlickrNet - cuz .net needs flickr love.

babysmash - my 17mo old loves it.

RSS.NET - a great easy to use rss lib - so good it went commerical, but the OSS version is still great.

MonoTorrent - http://monotorrent.com/ as a resident of Michigan I was pulling for the MSU student developed torrent lib, but Alan kicked but writing this library.

Gaia Ajax Widgets - very interesting.

JSC - the most awesome “compiler” that lets me write C# but target PHP, JS or ActionScript. Includes some libraries.

IKVM - for java interop

What is missing:

I don’t know of any WinForms libraries that make winforms better to use. I’d love to see this. But I still do winforms instead of WPF. Show me a WPF app that uses less than 30MB of RAM and I'll start singing WPF praises.

There are many free WPF libraries which are teasers from commercial vendors, some even open source, I think?

Answer 26

NAnt is just awesome... period.

One library I have not seen up there yet is the one to help create PDF documents.

PDFsharp

Answer 27

IoC Frameworks:

• Castle Windsor
• AutoFac http://code.google.com/p/autofac/

Log:

• log4net

PDF Library

• iTextSharp http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/

ORM

• iBATIS.net http://ibatis.apache.org/

Test

• NUnit
• Moq

Answer 28

1. Cruise Control .NET
2. CI-Factory
3. Windows Installer Xml

Answer 29

• Castle Project
• Spring.Net
• NHibernate
• Log4Net
• NUnit
• Rhino Mocks
• Boo

Answer 30

MVC - ProMesh.NET

ORM - CoolStorage.NET

Answer 31

For me... Subversion, TortoiseSVN, MonoRail, Windsor, NHibernate, Dojo Toolkit, Mono, MonoDevelop, Boo, nUnit, log4net, VirtualBox OSE, WinMerge

Answer 32

I like mojoportal but I don't know how "relevant" it might be.

Answer 33

• NAnt: the OS project that's had the biggest impact on me... followed by (in no order)
• AnkhSVN/Subversion
• MonoRail
• MbUnit
• Rhino Mocks
• Castle Windsor
• NHibernate ...and I'm forgetting tons of great things like 7-Zip, FlexWiki

It's good to be .net

Answer 34

Sandcastle

MSDN style documentation builder for XML documentation, the follow on from Ndoc

Answer 35

PostSharp - AOP for .Net.

Answer 36

Boo

Answer 37

Unity

Answer 38

cruiseControl.Net

Answer 39

DotNetKicks

Answer 40

I'd add in the C5 Generic Collection Library. Whereas the .NET BCL generic collections contain interfaces, they aren't programmed to their interfaces. As well, the C5 collections contain a richer set of features in addition to being backed by academic research.

Check out the set of collections contained within in this post.

Answer 41

RDL Project - http://www.fyireporting.com/ - reporting toolset

Answer 42

DesktopRails for portable desktop applications development: http://desktoprails.osl.ull.es

Answer 43

Mono.Cecil - An open source and even better replacement to System.Reflection. :)

Answer 44

Composite Application Guidance

Answer 45

IronPython

Answer 46

ASP.NET MVC

Answer 47

Vici Project: A coordinated and well-supported collection of free tools for building next-generation online applications for .NET.

• Vici MVC: MVC Web Application Framework for .NET 2.0 or higher. (Formerly ProMesh.NET)
• Vici CoolStorage: Fully typed Object Relational Mapping (ORM) library for .NET 2.0.
• Vici Parser: .NET library for late-bound expression parsing and template rendering.
• Vici WinService: Lightweight .NET library for creating Windows services.

More to follow in the future:

• Vici Graphics (Not OSS, but free)
• Vici dStyler (Not OSS, but free)
• Vici Reports
• Vici Wiki

Answer 48

S#arp Architecture

Answer 49

Although a shameless plug (since I'm one of the contributors to the project) there is another cool new project in the .NET ecosystem:

.Less - A port of the popular Ruby Lib LessCss

Less allows you to use variables, mixins and other cool language features inside CSS.

Answer 50

FubuMVC: Compositional, compile safe, convention-basedconfiguration for complex web applications.The MVC framework that doesn't get in your way.

Answer 51

Lots of great examples. Here are some I use that I don't think I saw listed:

Dependency injection: - autofac.dll

Linq: - HTMLAgilityPack.dll - LINQtoCSV.dll

Command line parsing: - mono.options.dll