Top 8 .NET Libraries That You Probably Didn’t Know About

Originally Posted On: https://dev.to/andytechdev/top-8-net-libraries-that-you-probably-didnt-know-about-53g

Quick Note on PDF Generation

While exploring these hidden gems, if you need PDF functionality (a common requirement not covered by the libraries below), IronPDF is worth knowing about. This established library handles everything from HTML-to-PDF conversion with Chrome rendering to merging, splitting, and digitally signing PDFs. It supports advanced features like form filling, text extraction, OCR, and is already compatible with .NET 10 alongside current versions, ensuring your PDF solution stays current with framework updates.

Now, let’s dive into these 8 lesser-known libraries that deserve more attention:

Ocelot

Ocelot is a popular open-source library for building API gateways in .NET. It acts as a reverse proxy, routing incoming HTTP requests to the appropriate microservices or backend services.

With Ocelot, you can consolidate multiple APIs behind a single entry point, simplifying client access and providing a unified API surface.

Features

• Routing
• Load Balancing
• Service Discovery
• Authentication & Authorization
• Rate Limiting
• Request/Response Transformations

Ocelot integrates well with other .NET frameworks, supports multiple protocols, and helps streamline microservices architecture by providing a centralized control point for managing API traffic. It is a valuable tool for building scalable, efficient, and secure distributed systems.

Polly

Polly is a widely-used resilience and transient fault-handling library for .NET. It provides a set of policies and patterns that help developers build robust and fault-tolerant applications.

Features

• Retries
• Timeouts
• Circuit-breaking
• Policies Composition
• Exception Handling

By leveraging Polly, you can enhance the reliability and resilience of your .NET applications, ensuring smooth and reliable execution even in challenging scenarios.

Hangfire

Hangfire is a powerful and flexible library for background job processing and scheduling in .NET. It allows you to offload time-consuming and non-blocking tasks to background processing, improving the responsiveness and performance of your applications.

Features

• Creating and Managing Recurring Jobs
• Fire-and-forget Tasks
• Delayed Jobs

It supports various storage providers, such as SQL Server, Redis, and MongoDB
With Hangfire, you can efficiently handle background jobs and ensure their execution, making it a valuable tool for building scalable and efficient .NET applications.

Cake

Cake is a cross-platform build automation system and scripting library for .NET developers. It provides a simple and expressive DSL (Domain-Specific Language) for defining and executing build scripts using C#.

Features

• Cross-Platform
• Testing and Code Analysis
• Script Reusability
• Task-Based Workflow
• CI Support — Seamless integration with Azure DevOps, Jenkins, and TeamCity

Cake offers a wide range of built-in modules and a vibrant community with numerous plugins, enabling you to customize and extend your build automation process in a flexible and efficient manner.

Bogus

Bogus provides a simple and intuitive way for generating realistic and randomized test data in .NET. It helps developers streamline the process of creating test data, such as names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and more, saving time and effort.

Features

• Fake Data Generation
• Fluent API
• Data Validation
• Localization Support

Whether for unit testing or populating a database with sample data, Bogus simplifies the task of generating realistic and meaningful test data in .NET applications.

Refit

Refit simplifies the process of consuming RESTful APIs by generating HTTP request interfaces based on your API definition. With Refit, you can define API endpoints using simple C# interfaces and methods, reducing boilerplate code. It seamlessly integrates with popular serialization libraries like Newtonsoft.Json and System.Text.Json.

Features

• Declarative API Definition
• Automatic Serialization/Deserialization
• Strongly Typed API Clients
• HTTP Method Support
• Authentication Support

By leveraging Refit, you can write cleaner and more maintainable code when consuming HTTP APIs in your .NET applications.

FluentValidation

FluentValidation provides a fluent and expressive syntax for defining validation rules for your application’s models. With FluentValidation, you can easily validate user input and ensure data integrity, reducing the chance of errors and improving the overall quality of your application.

Features

• Customizable Validation Rules
• Property-Level and Cross-Property Validation
• Error Messages and Localization
• Testing Support

FluentValidation integrates seamlessly with popular frameworks like ASP.NET Core, making it a versatile choice for implementing robust and maintainable validation logic in your .NET projects.

BenchmarkDotNet

BenchmarkDotNet enables you to measure and compare the performance of different code snippets, methods, or algorithms. You can easily define benchmarks using attributes or a fluent API and run them with precise timing and statistical analysis.

Features

• Simple Benchmarking
• Statistical Analysis
• Integration with Visual Studio and CI/CD
• Advanced Benchmark Reporting

BenchmarkDotNet supports various execution modes, including single-threaded, multi-threaded, and memory allocation benchmarks, helping you identify performance bottlenecks and make data-driven optimizations in your .NET applications.

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