Can you recommend a .net template engine?

Question

I am looking for a .net templating engine - something simple, lightweight, stable with not too many dependencies. All I need it for at the moment is creating templated plain text and html emails. Can anyone give me a good recommendation?

If it helps at all - something like Java's Freemarker or Velocity libraries.

[UPDATE] Thanks for the answers so far - much appreciated. I am really intested in recommendations or war stories from when you have used these libraries. Seems to be the best way to make a decision without trying each in turn.

Answer 1

Have you seen NVelocity, a .NET port of Velocity? http://nvelocity.sourceforge.net/

Answer 2

http://csharp-source.net/open-source/template-engines

http://joel.net/code/dotnet_templates.aspx

Hope this helps!!!

Answer 3

Here's a couple more:

• NHaml
• Spark
• Brail (can be used standalone)

About NVelocity, it has been forked by the Castle guys, it's being developed here (log)

For emails, I've never needed more than NVelocity.

Answer 4

string template from the anltr.org folks with a C# version too.

Answer 5

More Complete List

• ASP.Net inbuilt WebForm View Engine
• ASPView
• Brail
• NHaml (.Net port of Haml)
• Spark
• NVelocity
• StringTemplate.Net

Answer 6

Another one that may be useful: http://www.stefansarstedt.com/templatemaschine.html

Answer 7

I'm trying to deal with the same issue, and have been looking into the various view engines available for ASP.NET MVC. Basically, I need to take the incoming model data and generate XML to send to a web service. Either it feels like I'm jamming something where it doesn't belong, having trouble providing the template myself (everything seems designed to have you point to a file path), or something else. Any thoughts?

Answer 8

I've just released an open source project. It's aimed principally at email templating but you could use the parser by itself if you wanted to. You can read some more details and grab the source code from my blog.

http://thecodedecanter.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/town-crier-an-open-source-e-mail-templating-engine-for-net/