In this digital age, if a business wants to stay relevant, they have to keep fulfilling the needs of its customers. But in the era of ever-changing trends and cut-throat competition, it is hard to keep up with expectations. And that is why businesses must find the right technology that can help them solve their problems. .NET is one of the best technologies that can help you deliver customer-centric and user-friendly products and services.

Many unique features and characteristics of the ASP.NET technology have already made it a fan favorite among users as well as developers. Many refer to the .NET development framework as a blessing from Microsoft that developers can easily leverage to build robust, reliable, and feature-rich web and mobile applications.

As the .NET Core was used more often for various software development projects, several libraries were created to cater to the growing needs of the developers. These libraries are as powerful and reliable as the .NET technology. But to use them at their best, you must be familiar with all of them and know when a certain library can be the most effective.

To help you with that, we have provided here a list of .NET libraries that are very important for .NET Core integrations. So, enjoy browsing through them to sort out which would be the most useful for your upcoming project.

Top 12 useful .NET libraries

1. AutoMapper

While developing a software application, developers have to write code that can map one object to another. But that is one mundane task. So .NET technologies have provided a little library that can automatically map one object with another. This helps developers pay their attention to more priority work. AutoMapper, as the name suggests, is a convention-based object-object mapper for .NET technologies.

GitHub ⟷ NuGet ⟷ Website

2. Swashbuckle (Swagger — OpenAPI)

The .NET technology has launched a library called Swagger that helps you easily create an API. The tool is designed using ASP.NET Core technology. It can help the development team, enterprises, or users not only with the creation of API documentation but also with UI generation. Models, routers, and controllers are used to create the UI that can explore and test operations.

In addition to the OpenAPI 3.0 generator and Swagger 2.0, Swashbuckle also comes with an embedded version of Swagger UI that is empowered by Swagger JSON. so, when an API is in sync with the latest code, you can use this tool to complement the API with living documentation. Using this tool needs minimal maintenance and coding which allows you to focus on developing great API.

GitHub ⟷ NuGet ⟷ Website

3. BenchmarkDotNet

Now, you can determine the benchmarks using methods and then track their performance as well as share the reproducible measurement experiment. All thanks to BenchmarkDotNet. Benchmarking is the same as writing unit tests. The perfolizer statistical engine that comes with BenchmarkDotNet ensures that the results are precise and reliable.

Using BenchmarkDotNEt for benchmarking will not only guide you through the entire process but will also prevent you from making any mistakes. The tool will warn you if something goes wrong with the obtained measurements or your benchmark design. The result sheets are also quite user-friendly. You don't waste your efforts finding the relevant information.

All the important data regarding your measurement experiment will be already highlighted. BenchmarkDotNet is pretty popular amidst the community of .NET developers. Additionally, it has got the support from the .NET foundation. More than 6800 projects have adopted this tool for benchmarking and measurement experiments including .NET Runtime.

GitHub ⟷ NuGet ⟷ Website

4. GenFu

.NET technology enables you to generate realistic test data with the help of a library called GenFu. It comes with an internal database that consists of randomly created data or values which is used to populate properties through reflection by using various property fillers.

If you wish, you can just override those fillers and give Genfu a little hint about how they should be filled. GenFu is smart enough to create the necessary objects for the test and prototype data. It will go through your object graph to fill in the properties in your type to make it look like real data. GenFu’s static methods are widely used by developers for seeding the database, design-time data, or creating new objects for testing.

GitHub ⟷ NuGet ⟷ Website

5. Moq

Moq (you can either pronounce it as Mock or as Mock-you) is the only mocking library that was developed right from the scratch. It fully leverages lambda expressions and .NET Linq expression trees. This makes it one of the most refactoring-friendly, type-safe, and productive mocking libraries in the market. In addition to the mocking interfaces, it supports classes as well. And you don't need any prior experience or knowledge to work with the mocking library as its API is pretty simple.

GitHub ⟷ NuGet ⟷ Website

6. AutoFixture

AutoFixure is another open-source .NET library. It was designed specifically to increase maintainability which is achieved by minimizing the Arrange phase of the unit test. It enables the developers to easily build object graphs that display test data. This helps in shifting their focus from how to set up the test scenario to what object is being tested.

AutoFixture also helps developers in writing maintainable unit tests quickly. And it is easy to adopt the test-driven development approach while using this library. AutoFixture can help automate non-relevant Test Fixture Setup which allows the developers to focus on the key aspects of the test.

GitHub ⟷ NuGet ⟷ Website

7. Hangfire

Hangfire provides an easier way to process a background job in your .NET apps. You don't even need a separate Windows service or any other process. It is extremely easy to perform recurring, delayed, and fire-and-forget jobs in the ASP.NET apps. Hangfire also supports long and short-running jobs along with CPU and I/O-intensive ones. Unlike other .Net frameworks and libraries, you don't need a Windows Service/Task Scheduler to run the background process in this library. This library is also supported by MSMQ, SQL Azure, SQL Server, and Redis.

GitHub ⟷ NuGet ⟷ Website

8. Serilog

Now logging fully-structured events is very simple with this .NET library. Serilog is a diagnostic logging library for .NET apps. You can easily set up and run this library on all .NET platforms because it comes with clean APIs. Serilog can indeed work well with simple .NET apps. But the structured logging of Serilog shines truly when it is instrumenting asynchronous, distributed, and complicated systems and apps.

GitHub ⟷ NuGet ⟷ Website

9. MiniProfiler

.NET technology also provides a library for profiling your apps. MiniProfiler can help you optimize performance and debug issues by adding as many custom timings as you want to add here to check where you spent your time and which queries are to run. Although its working is simple, it is a very effective profiling library and UI for .NET and .NET Core websites.

GitHub ⟷ NuGet ⟷ Website

10. EPPlus

You don't need interop to build an advanced Excel spreadsheet with .NET. EPPlus comes with a basic functionality that’s required for reading and writing a spreadsheet. EPPlus uses Office Open XML format (xlsx) to read and write Excel files. This .NET library has no other dependencies than .NET.

GitHub ⟷ NuGet ⟷ Website

11. FluentAssertions

This .NET library can now help you identify the expected outcomes of a BDD or a TDD-style unit test. A set made up of a.NET extension methods is named FluentAssertions library. This library will enable you to write assertions that can keep them away from the debugger hell. It also helps them communicate what they are trying to achieve.

GitHub ⟷ NuGet ⟷ Website

12. RestSharp

Hundreds of thousands of people use this HTTP API Client and Simple Rest for .NET development projects. Its unique features include various authentication processes, request and response type detections, automatic serialization and deserialization, and more.

GitHub ⟷ NuGet ⟷ Website

Conclusion

Many developers opt for .NET technology to work with. So it is also important to identify and learn about the best .NET libraries that can support you in the development process. I hope the list of top .NET libraries we discussed above has been helpful to you in selecting the right libraries for your next .NET development project.