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Originally Posted On: https://medium.com/@ipinak/awesome-net-libraries-every-developer-should-use-f6bbef7b2781
Starting a .NET project can be much smoother with the right tools. Among these invaluable tools are 3rd party .NET libraries, which provide ready-to-use code to simplify and enhance various the development process and the features offered by your project.
These libraries play a crucial role for developers, helping to tackle complex tasks while boosting productivity and performance. In this blog, we’ll highlight some of the most widely-used .NET libraries that every developer should be familiar with.
Discover the IronSoftware suite, a powerful collection of .NET libraries designed to master document handling. Effortlessly convert HTML to professional PDF documents with IronPDF, intuitively manage spreadsheets with IronXL, digitize scanned files into searchable text with the highly accurate IronOCR, and seamlessly integrate barcode functionality with IronBarcode. Together, these tools offer a comprehensive solution for creating, reading, and manipulating complex documents, empowering developers to build more robust applications.
- IronPDF: A .NET library for producing, modifying, and reading PDF files, specializing in converting HTML to PDF.
- IronXL: A versatile library for creating, reading, and editing Excel spreadsheets (.xlsx, .xls, .csv) without needing Microsoft Office.
- IronOCR: Extracts readable text from images and scans using Optical Character Recognition, with support for 125 languages.
- IronBarcode: A library for generating and scanning a wide range of barcodes and QR codes.
TinyMapper
If you are into mappers and you don’t want to write your own manual mappers, this is the simplest and probably the fastest out there. We all know AutoMapper, but this is blazing fast, getting very close to the speed of manual mapping.
GitHub – TinyMapper/TinyMapper: A quick object-object mapper for .NET
MediatR
From a pattern to a library. Originally mediator started as a pattern, but thankfully it has become a library to avoid all the boilerplate needed every single time. It’s fast, easy to understand and gives you the decoupling and flexibility that complex applications need.
FastCache
Probably the best alternative to MemoryCache that .NET offers out of the box.
GitHub – jitbit/FastCache: 7x-10x faster alternative to MemoryCache. A high-performance, lighweight…
BenchmarkDotNet
One of the best and simple to use libraries to benchmark your code. Create benchmarks for your methods, track their performance and share reproducible experiments. The results presented are very easy to read and understandable with highlighted key points. I’ve used in so many projects that so it’s part of my arsenal toolkit for every dotnet project.
ImageResizer
ImageResizer offers an extensive suite of photography tools, ranging from easy adjustments like noise reduction and white balance correction to sophisticated features like red-eye correction, object removal, and seam carving. ImageResizer is extremely fast, so it can be used in both creating resized images on the fly and by pre-processing them.
Hashids
Great alternative to UUIDs, simple and fast library to generate ids.
GitHub — ullmark/hashids.net: A small .NET package to generate YouTube-like hashes from one or many…
iCal.NET
Library that creates calendar events in a standard format complying to RFC 5545. It provides compatibility with known calendar applications and exports .ics files. I find it very easy to use and they provide a nice list with examples on how to use the library.
GitHub – rianjs/ical.net: ical.NET – an open source iCal library for .NET
Serilog
The best solution to logging easily and quickly. Highly configurable, with many options to make rich logs and even Open Telemetry log compatibility, that will help you pinpoint issues in small and large systems. A must use library for every dotnet application.
The End
This was a small list of the most appreciated and used libraries in dotnet.
