Top .NET Libraries You Should Know
Whenever an enterprise plans to develop a robust, scalable, and secure application, the .NET framework has always been the go-to platform for them. Even though it has been 19 years since Microsoft released the .NET framework, it continues to stay a top choice for developers.
Within .NET, if there is one element that developers cannot live without today, it has to be NuGet, the package manager. It allows developers to share and acquire useful .NET libraries for their applications.
Developers can also create packages and share them with NuGet.org which houses public NuGet packages. This can then be used by other developers to achieve various functionalities in their code.
But in this post, it’s not about NuGet, it’s all about the most popular .NET libraries that you can import. We bring you not 1, but 7 popular .NET libraries that have found great acceptance across the world. Read on…
Table of Contents
- Swashbuckle
- FluentEmail
- AutoFac
- Xunit
- NopCommerce
- App Metrics
- HashLib
Swashbuckle
This .NET library helps you manage and test your .NET web APIs. It also builds API documentation for your application using Swagger. To the uninitiated, Swagger is a set of rules that describes the state of REST APIs. They are both machine-readable and interpretable by humans.
Some of the remarkable features of Swashbuckle include -
- Providing seamless integration with Swagger Ui
- Extensive support for authentication OAuth2 scheme, API keys, and basic authentication
- Support for XML comments
Swashbuckle has three main components -
- Swashbuckle.AspNetCore.Swagger - This is a Swagger object model that provides the functionality to expose the Swagger document APIs as JSON endpoints i.e publicly available URLs.
- Swashbuckle.AspNetCore.SwaggerGen - Provides the functionality to generate the objects, return types, and workflow of the APIs.
- Swashbuckle.AspNetCore.SwaggerUI - This is an embedded version of SwaggerUI provided by Swashbuckle.
FluentEmail
FluentEmail is an open-source .Net library that helps you implement email functionality in your .NET app in less than 10 minutes. It supports Razor for prebuilt email templates and facilitates sending mails through popular email delivery services such as SendGrid and MailGun through the SMTP protocol. It offers you more control over how your mail is sent via the email delivery service.
Packages of FluentEmail include -
- FluentEmail.Core - This is a base package that helps in sending emails through SMTP. Since it is the base package, it only includes the basic defaults and the domain model.
- FluentEmail.mailgun - Used to send emails using mailgun REST API.
- FluentEmail.SendGrid - For sending emails via SendGrid REST APIs.
- FluentEmail.SMTP - To send emails via SMTP protocols.
AutoFac
AutoFac is an IoC container for .NET. It allows running classes and dependencies as separate components so that they can be easily managed when they become more scalable and complex. AutoFac has a good community following and has the reputation of being the most downloaded NuGet package in .NET.
AutoFac also helps you identify misconfigurations and issues in large-scale applications. It does this by isolating components and providing better clarity. A third-party container in your application improves the readability of the code and provides easily testable code, centralizing the dependency management for classes. This helps you scale only the required component instead of scaling the entire application.
xUnit
Xunit is a free, open-source, community-focused testing tool that allows you to test small independent components rather than going behind larger chunks of a program. This allows alignment of design goals and simplicity with the framework's features. Installing this package installs the following dependencies -
- Xunit.Core - Includes all the libraries for writing unit test cases for testing your application for all possible scenarios
- Xunit.assert - Includes assertion libraries to validate if a condition is valid or not.
- Xunit.analyzers - Installing this package provides your testing team with code analyzers that help them find and fix frequently occurring issues and other bugs when writing robust test cases.
NopCommerce
NopCommerce is an open-source e-commerce solution, which is fully customizable. With just a few clicks, you can build an online shopping cart effortlessly. When you opt for NopCommerce, you can use its multi-vendor and multi-store functionalities. It also offers optimized search engine solutions and user-friendly URLs.
App Metrics
App Metrics is a cross-platform and open-source library that records a plethora of metrics in your application. This includes the count of logged-in users at a particular time, numbers of requests, the run time of a DB query, the response time of an API, free memory available, and much more. It supports an array of utilities such as counters, timers, and histograms to measure the performance and error in each endpoint of a .NET application, MVC, or web API.
HashLib
Hashlib contains the implementations of several hashing algorithms using which you can hash files, streams, and all types of data in your .NET application. Hashing is generally used to retrieve specific data from your database at faster rates using the hash key.
The hash keys are used to get the direct location of the data instead of using an indexed structure. In summary, searching elements in your application can be made easy by leveraging the HashLib library.
Summary
Nuget.org hosts over 100,000 packages that help developers achieve complex functionalities right from monitoring the response time of APIs to build an e-commerce solution. In addition to the above packages, there are a wide array of .NET libraries that can help you deliver .NET applications effortlessly.