Top Ten .Net Open Source Tools

With Rob PAddick

Why would you want to use an open source tools?

• Some have many great coders contributing to the project
• Sometimes commercial products have agendas or are not the best choice or option for a given problem
• Often open source projects survive just because they are best of breed at that time
• You can often extend or customize them.
• It is easier to debug problems when you have the code
• you can also try reflector
• It is easier to understand usage if you can trace through the code

SharpZipLib

• A library for compression

PDFSharp

• A PDF creation library

• Similar to iTextSharp which is a little more complicated

Cruise Control and Nant and Nunit

• CI, build, and testing tools

NHibernate

• An Object Relational Mapping tool

Subversion

• A source control system

• Uses optimistic source control

• Visual subversion even has integration with Active directory!
• Subversion has hooks so you can implement check in rules

DotNetBlodEngine

• A blog engine
• Written in c#
• Has easy setup

ASP.Net AJAX control toolkit

• AJAX controls
• The code is available too

DotNetNuke

• An OSS portal application
• Has a big external ecosystem

Ghengis

• A WinForms control library
• Originally written by Chris Sells
• Good example of extending controls

ConnectionStrings.com

• Provides different type of database connections strings with different parameters

MySQL

· An Open Source full featured database

Where to find OSS

• codeplex.com
• thoughtworks.com
• paint.net is a great example
• code.msdn.com
• Microsoft patterns and practices

Notes

• we can get away with only writing in vb.net, but we really have to be able to read and understand C#