In this article we will learn about Most popular ASP.Net Core Libraries every developer should know. Open-source libraries greatly reduce developer workload and make it easier to construct and manage applications. Here it go over some of the most useful ASP.Net Core libraries that every developer should be aware of. Please read my previous article of How to deploy Angular App in Azure Static Web App.
List of ASP.Net Core Libraries are :
Below are some of the list of ASP.Net Core libraries that are commonly used. On below we discuss about bit more of frequent used libraries.
- Serilog / NLog
- Hangfire / Quartz
- RabbitMQ
- Dapper / Entity Framework Core
- Health checks
- Swashbuckle (Swagger — OpenAPI)
- XUnit / Nunit
- Moq
- FluentAssertions
- SignalR
- Newtonsoft
- MediatR
- Fluent Validations
- MiniProfiler
- Auto Mapper
- BenchmarkDotNet
- iText
- EPPlus
- MiniProfiler
- MailKit
- CacheManager
- Swashbuckle (Swagger — OpenAPI)
- Humanizer
- NodaTime
- Bogus
- Polly
- RestSharp
- AutoFixture
Serilog / NLog
When it comes to software development, the first concern is to ensure a well-defined logging mechanism. NLog / Serilog are the most common packages for structured logging in.NET Core. Both of these loggers have a sizable community and well-defined documentation. Logging may appear insignificant, but once your asp.net core application is in production, these Loggers will become your life easier.
Serilog and Nlog allow you to log to the console, file system, database, and even email you if your programme encounters a fatal error.
Serilog is a library for diagnostic logging in.NET applications. It is simple to install, has a clean API, and works on all recent.NET platforms. Although beneficial in simple applications, Serilog’s structured logging capability shines when instrumenting complex, distributed, and asynchronous applications and systems.
NLog is an open-source logging tool, It’s free, cross-platform, and simple to set up and grow. NLog is a great, easy-to-use logging program with strong log routing and administration tools, making it an excellent choice for a high-performance logging system.
Hangfire / Quartz
If your application has any potentially time-consuming processes, we can schedule them for a specified time of day. Hangfire and Quartz both allow you to accomplish all of this with minimum configuration straight out of the box. Each job is processed in a separate thread in the background.
Hangfire An easy way to perform background job processing in your .NET and .NET Core applications. No Windows Service or separate process required. Incredibly easy way to perform fire-and-forget, delayed and recurring jobs inside .NET applications. CPU and I/O intensive, long-running and short-running jobs are supported. No Windows Service / Task Scheduler required. Backed by Redis, SQL Server, SQL Azure and MSMQ.
Quartz is an open source .NET library to use background jobs.
One reason need the favor Hangfire over Quartz is the Hangfire dashboard. You only need to add one line of code to your startup class to connect a Job Dashboard to your application. Hangfire makes it so simple. Having saying that, Quartz is comparable to Hangfire in a number of different respects.
RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ is just one of many message brokers, which handles accepting, storing, and sending messages.Having a message broker, like RabbitMQ, manage our inter-application communication, allows our system as a whole to scale much easier. For example, we can use messages to inform Subscribers of a long-running task that needs processing.
It makes use of the Asynchronous development principle. It essentially serves as a middleman that can be utilized to lessen web server loads and response times. It supports a number of messaging protocols.
Dapper / Entity Framework Core
Dapper is a simple object mapper for .NET. This high-performance micro-ORM supports SQL Server, MySQL, Sqlite, SqlCE, Firebird, and so on. It can be used by simply installing the NuGet package, which extends the IDbConnection interface functionality. The familiar Stack Overflow site is using this library.
Dapper is much faster than EF Core because it has a very thin layer between the application and the database. Entity Framework, on the other hand, is a feature-rich ORM, unlike Dapper. These ORMs essentially act as a layer between your application and the database, allowing you to interact with the data without needing to utilize typical SQL queries within your application.
Dapper: GitHub ⟷ NuGet ⟷ Website
Entity Framework Core : GitHub ⟷ NuGet
Health checks
Microsoft provides this critical middleware for monitoring the health of the application and other associated components. Endpoints that expose health checks can be configured for a variety of purposes, including database health monitoring, external API health, server resources, and much more.
Microsoft.Extensions.Diagnostics.HealthChecks
SignalR
SignalR may significantly improve the usability of your ASP.Net Core applications. It enables you to immediately push content to client-side web applications from server-side code. It functions similarly to Javascript in your.NET application. SignalR key use cases are chat applications, real-time data transfers, and notifications.
dotnet add package Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR –version 2.4.3
Features:
- Handles connection management automatically.
- Sends messages to all connected clients simultaneously. For example, a chat room.
- Sends messages to specific clients or groups of clients.
- Scales to handle increasing traffic.
Newtonsoft
This most popular package is a JSON foundation for.NET that has been around for a while. It lets you convert objects to and from JSON.
dotnet add package Newtonsoft.Json –version 13.0.3
XUnit / NUnit
Testing is quite vital before your application becomes production ready. NUnit is an open sourced testing framework used to write test cases and assertions. It also shows up a well structured report after running the tests.
xUnit is a free, open source, community-focused unit testing tool for the .NET Framework. Written by the original inventor of NUnit v2, xUnit.net is the latest technology for unit testing C#, F#, VB.NET and other .NET languages. xUnit.net works with ReSharper, CodeRush, TestDriven.NET and Xamarin
MediatR
This package enables you to implement the Mediator Pattern in your application, allowing you to isolate read and write operations and develop a more decoupled application. Simple, unambitious mediator implementation in .NET. In-process messaging with no dependencies. Supports request/response, commands, queries, notifications and events, synchronous and async with intelligent dispatching via C# generic variance.
Fluent Validations
FluentValidation is a popular .NET validation library for building strongly-typed validation rules. It is a small validation library for .NET that uses a fluent interface and lambda expressions for building validation rules.
Have you become tired of defining validation rules in your entity classes? Consider adding all of the Required, Min length Data Annotation Attributes to each attribute. This isn’t a good method to write clean code. FluentValidation is a.NET Validation Library for creating strongly typed validation rules. It comes in handy when creating sophisticated validation rules for class properties.
MiniProfiler
This library profiles your application in real time. It provides a user interface and assists you in measuring the performance of your application. It aids in the identification of performance issues in your ASP.NET Core application. Mini Profiler has an Entity Framework addon that allows you to measure query performance.
dotnet add package MiniProfiler –version 4.2.22
Auto Mapper
AutoMapper is a convention-based object-object mapper in .NET. It is a simple little library built to solve a deceptively complex problem — getting rid of code that mapped one object to another. This type of code is rather dreary and boring to write.
Automapper is a library that takes out all of the fuss of mapping one object to another. It has built-in conventions and logic on how to map an object to another which you could override as well. It is one of the most powerful libraries on this list.
Swashbuckle (Swagger — OpenAPI)
Simplify API development for users, teams, and enterprises with the Swagger open source and professional toolset. Swagger tooling for API’s built with ASP.NET Core. Generate beautiful API documentation, including a UI to explore and test operations, directly from your routes, controllers and models. In addition to its Swagger 2.0 and OpenAPI 3.0 generator, Swashbuckle also provides an embedded version of the awesome swagger-ui that’s powered by the generated Swagger JSON. This means you can complement your API with living documentation that’s always in sync with the latest code. Best of all, it requires minimal coding and maintenance, allowing you to focus on building an awesome API.
Moq
The most popular and friendly mocking library for .NET. Moq (pronounced “Mock-you” or just “Mock”) is the only mocking library for .NET developed from scratch to take full advantage of .NET Linq expression trees and lambda expressions, which makes it the most productive, type-safe and refactoring-friendly mocking library available. And it supports mocking interfaces as well as classes. Its API is extremely simple and straightforward, and doesn’t require any prior knowledge or experience with mocking concepts.
RestSharp
Simple REST and HTTP API Client for .NET. RestSharp is probably the most popular HTTP client library for .NET. Featuring automatic serialization and deserialization, request and response type detection, variety of authentications and other useful features, it is being used by hundreds of thousands of projects.
EPPlus
Create advanced Excel spreadsheets using .NET, without the need of interop. It had the basic functionality needed to read and write a spreadsheet. EPPlus is a .NET library that reads and writes Excel files using the Office Open XML format (xlsx). EPPlus has no dependencies other than .NET.
iText
iText 7 for .NET is the .NET version of the iText 7 library, formerly known as iTextSharp, which it replaces. iText 7 represents the next level of SDKs for developers that want to take advantage of the benefits PDF can bring. Equipped with a better document engine, high and low-level programming capabilities and the ability to create, edit, etc.
Conclusion
We discussed here about Most popular ASP.Net Core Libraries every developer should know. Open-source libraries greatly reduce developer workload and make it easier to construct and manage applications.
Leave behind your valuable queries and suggestions in the comment section below. Also, if you think this article helps you, do not forget to share this with your developer community. Happy Coding 🙂
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