What's Your Favorite C# Open Source Project of the year 2008?

Question

C# Open Source Project Of The Year Award 2008

Let us decide which project should receive the honor, from the Stack Overflow community. And as the best programming community, I think the community opinion matters.

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What's the best Open Source Project you've found, and loved in 2008? List it here, and let the community vote for the same. And in the end, we'll have a great list of interesting open source projects. Your entry should have a brief description, and a link to download the source code. You might consider entries from sites like Codeplex, Sourceforge.net, Codeproject etc.

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Important: Please look in the existing list before posting your entry, if it is already there, just vote.

Answer 1

Singularity Operating System - Click to download

Singularity provides Softare Isolation instead of hardware enforced protection domains and heavy context switching. Developed by Microsoft Research, now available at Codeplex as open source.

The implementation includes a IL to native compiler, a really good bootloader and the Sing# compiler

Go and download Singularity source and CD Image here

You can actually boot it on Microsoft Virtual PC (free download). Very interesting.

Answer 2

I really like SourceGrid

• SourceGrid is a .NET Windows Forms grid control written entirely in C# with managed code.
• SourceGrid can be used to visualize or to change data in a table format.
• SourceGrid can be used bound to a data source (typically a DataView) or creating each cell directly.

There are a lot of controls of this type available, but often are expensive, difficult to customize or too DataSet oriented. SourceGrid use only managed code (without API or Interop) and can be used with any .NET 2 compatible environments.

Answer 3

Sandcastle Help File Builder - I just can not live without this right now. From the description:

"Sandcastle, created by Microsoft, is a tool used for creating MSDN-style documentation from .NET assemblies and their associated XML comments files. The current version is the May 2008 release. It is command line based and has no GUI front-end, project management features, or an automated build process like those that you can find in NDoc. The Sandcastle Help File Builder was created to fill in the gaps, provide the missing NDoc-like features that are used most often, and provide graphical and command line based tools to build a help file in an automated fashion."

Answer 4

Screwturn Wiki is an open source wiki written in C#.

Answer 5

I've used BugTracker.NET in multiple companies I've worked with, in both large and small teams.

Open Source ASP.NET/SQL Server Bug Tracking solution, which even interfaces with Subversion.

Answer 6

VDM

This virtual desktop program takes advantage of this new API and uses some tricks of its own to provide a powerful virtual desktop manager with a full screen thumbnail based preview. Vista and XP.

Answer 7

Iron Python - Click to download

Surprised that we missed it!! IronPython is very hot as well. I really like th interactive programming and ability to host Python in my own apps :)

"IronPython is a new implementation of the Python programming language running on .NET. It supports an interactive console with fully dynamic compilation. It is well integrated with the rest of the .NET Framework and makes all .NET libraries easily available to Python programmers, while maintaining full compatibility with the Python language."

Most part of IronPython implementation is in C#. Must Watch!!

Answer 8

Managed Extensibility Framework

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a new library in .NET that enables greater reuse of applications and components. Using MEF, .NET applications can make the shift from being statically compiled to dynamically composed. If you are building extensible applications, extensible frameworks and application extensions, then MEF is for you.

Answer 9

Composite WPF (aka Prism)

The Composite Application Guidance for WPF can help you split the development of your WPF client application across multiple development teams, each responsible for the development of a piece of the application, and help you seamlessly compose those pieces together into a client application. The guidance includes a reference implementation, reusable library code (called the Composite Application Library), documentation, quick start tutorials and hands-on labs.

Answer 10

Ninject

Ninject is a lightning-fast, ultra-lightweight dependency injector for .NET applications. It helps you split your application into a collection of loosely-coupled, highly-cohesive pieces, and then glue them back together in a flexible manner. By using Ninject to support your software's architecture, your code will become easier to write, reuse, test, and modify.

Answer 11

DotNetNuke, a great extensible opensource CMS system.

Answer 12

Mono - Website Here, Download Here

I think Mono is a good bet.

As we all know, "Mono is a cross platform, open source .NET development framework."

Answer 13

Banshee

Play your music and videos. Stay entertained and up to date with podcasts and video podcasts. Discover new music with Last.fm radio. Sync your G1 phone, iPod, and other devices. We think you'll love the new Banshee!

Answer 14

Ra-Ajax - "Create stunning and lightweight Web Applications without hassle" - Quote Me... ;)

PS! Yes I work with it...

Answer 15

Coolite

Answer 16

CruiseControl.NET

Answer 17

I like http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/. It's a .net blog platform that supports MySQL which is pretty cool.

Answer 18

Npgsql - .NET provider for the PostgreSQL object-relational database management system - a good one, too.

Answer 19

Clone Detective for Visual Studio

Clone Detective is a Visual Studio integration that allows you to analyze C# projects for source code that is duplicated somewhere else. Having duplicates can easily lead to inconsistencies and often is an indicator for poorly factored code.

Answer 20

Autofac

Answer 21

ASP.NET MVC

Answer 22

NHibernate

Answer 23

Gallio/MbUnit

Answer 24

Silverlight Toolkit

Terrarium 2.0

Answer 25

Windows Installer XML Toolset

Makes creating Windows Installer packages easy and similar to writing code. Uses a compile/link approach to build MSI packages from xml source. Most of the toolset is written in C#.

Answer 26

VisualWebGUI

The best of the bred Open Source RIA AJAX Framework with full server approach and zero client footprint.

Answer 27

TracExplorer

This is a Visual Studio addin for Trac integration and, in turn TortoiseSvn's bugtraq integration.

Answer 28

ZedGraph for graphs as you might have expected ;)

Answer 29

ZedGraph

Well written easy to use charting package for WinForms. Better and more fully functioned than many commercial ones.

Answer 30

SubSonic 2.2 has been very, very good to me. Great Data Access Layer generator that works very well with C#, VB, F#, MS SQL, and (after some tweaks) MySQL! The tutorial videos are excellent.

Answer 31

Java - it seems a fair few libraries are just Java ports. If it wasn't for Java there would be no .NET.

Answer 32

The Vici Project:

• Vici MVC
• Vici CoolStorage
• Vici Parser
• Vici WinService

Answer 33

Rawr

I am a former wow junkie and I spent so much time hacking on this and using it, almost as much time as I spent playing wow.

Answer 34

StructureMap

Answer 35

Stateless from Nicholas Blumhardt is an elegant implemetation of a state machine. We have used this instead of the Windows Workflow state machine. The beauty is that with very few lines of code you can configure a state machine with conditional triggers.

Below is a sample from Nicholas's site:

    enum State
    {
        OffHook,
        Ringing,
        Connected,
        OnHold,
        PhoneDestroyed
    }

    enum Trigger
        {
            CallDialed,
            HungUp,
            CallConnected,
            LeftMessage,
            PlacedOnHold,
            TakenOffHold,
            PhoneHurledAgainstWall
        }



var phoneCall = new StateMachine<State, Trigger>(State.OffHook);

phoneCall.Configure(State.OffHook)
    .Allow(Trigger.CallDialed, State.Ringing);

phoneCall.Configure(State.Ringing)
    .Allow(Trigger.HungUp, State.OffHook)
    .Allow(Trigger.CallConnected, State.Connected);

phoneCall.Configure(State.Connected)
    .OnEntry(t => StartCallTimer())
    .OnExit(t => StopCallTimer())
    .Allow(Trigger.LeftMessage, State.OffHook)
    .Allow(Trigger.HungUp, State.OffHook)
    .Allow(Trigger.PlacedOnHold, State.OnHold);

phoneCall.Configure(State.OnHold)
    .SubstateOf(State.Connected)
    .Allow(Trigger.TakenOffHold, State.Connected)
    .Allow(Trigger.HungUp, State.OffHook)
    .Allow(Trigger.PhoneHurledAgainstWall, State.PhoneDestroyed);

Answer 36

FubuMvc

Answer 37

S#arp Architecture

Answer 38

Fluent NHibernate

Answer 39

DotNet Zip http://www.codeplex.com/DotNetZip

Answer 40

CodeProject