As the technical editor for the UK MSDN Flash I get surprisingly free rein to decide what content to place in it . I suspect one day they will notice – but I will enjoy it while it lasts. Every 3 months or so I do a special edition of the Flash, and this week I chose to go with “Open Source Frameworks and Libraries”. I have written before on Microsoft and Open Source and the rosy future I see ahead and I decided it was time (long overdue?) to give some of the great OSS for .NET developers wider visibility. The Flash newsletter is great for this as it goes out to around 70K developers in the UK. With the help of the UK community (see the provisional list of suggestions), I came up with the following 23 OSS projects.
I have tried to strike a balance between some fairly well known projects and some lesser known but equally well respected offerings. Which means we have “old favourites” such as xUnit and Moq (testing and mocking respectively), alongside Argotic (syndication framework), Excel Data Reader (Excel file to DataSet) and #SNMP (SNMP library) as well as some frameworks primarily developed out of the UK such as Fluent NHibernate (no more XML ORM mapping) and OpenRasta (REST based framework for building web applications).
Enjoy!