Favorite tooling / Nuget packages

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 11:39:05 +0200

Don’t reinvent the wheel

An important skill as a software developer is knowing when to build something yourself and when to pull in a external dependency. This is a delicate balance.

When you pull in a dependency you need to ask yourself: “What if this package would disappear tomorrow?”. Worst case would be that from now on you need to support it yourself. Plan accordingly - maybe add an abstraction to make it easier to replace the dependency in the future.

On the other hand, deciding to write everything yourself might be a interesting intellectual challenge but your customer who is paying the bill will probably be less impressed 💸

During the course of multiple projects and solving problems, you will encounter lots of tools and packages. People might recommend them to you or they are considered to be a de facto standard within your community.

My selection criteria

These criteria are subjective - it is what I consider to be important. These are not hard rules.

I prefer open source over commercial. I don’t dismiss commercial software but all things being equal, open source would have my preference.
Libraries over frameworks. Frameworks tend to force you in a specific way of working while with libraries you can pick what to use. Having said, sometimes you cannot avoid a framework.
Packages/tools that are actively maintained are a plus.
For a commercial project, I tend to avoid the more ‘viral’ GPL-like licenses. Not because I personally dislike these licenses but because they are usually not accepted by customers/our organisation.

Show me the list

This is my list of useful tools and Nuget packages that I use on a regular basis in projects (both my own and at work). I will update this list to keep it current and I can refer other people to it. The description in italics means that it is lifted directly from the project website.

Syntactic sugar / patterns

Syntactic sugar refers to features that can be used to simply existing syntax for accomplishing a task. Patterns are a well-known defined way to solve common problems.

OneOf - provides F# style discriminated unions.
Dunet - similar to OneOf, but with source generators.
FluentResults - return a result object instead of an exception.
Vogen - “is a semi-opinionated library which is a Source Generator to generate value objects.”
NodaTime - if you have to write functionality that will span timezones, use this library. No exceptions.
Flurl - an elegant way to build URLs & set query params
UnitsNet - “add strongly typed quantities to your code and get merrily on with your life.”
SmartEnums - if you prefer Java style enums that can have behaviour.
Comparers - can’t be bothered with all the boilerplate code for writing comparers? Use this.
Mapster - “a .NET source generator for generating object mappings. No runtime reflection.”
Stateless - “create state machines and lightweight state machine-based workflows directly in .NET code.”
Polly - “Polly is a .NET resilience and transient-fault-handling library that allows developers to express resilience strategies such as Retry, Circuit Breaker, Hedging, Timeout, Rate Limiter and Fallback in a fluent and thread-safe manner.”
FluentValidation - “is a .NET library for building strongly-typed validation rules.”
Reactive Extensions for .NET - “a library for event-driven programming with a composable, declarative model.”
FastCloner - “Fast cloning library, supporting anything from .NET 4.6 to modern .NET 8+. Implements both deep and shallow cloning.”
CliWrap - “a library for interacting with external command-line interfaces.”
TickerQ - “a fast, reflection-free background task scheduler for .NET”

Testing

All tools related to testing.

xUnit - I simply prefer xUnit over NUnit.
xUnit.SkippableFact - Let’s you skip certain tests based on conditions.
NSubstitute - “Mock, stub, fake, spy, test double? Strict or loose? Nah, just substitute for the type you need!”
Autofixture - “is designed to make Test-Driven Development more productive and unit tests more refactoring-safe. It does so by removing the need for hand-coding anonymous variables as part of a test’s Fixture Setup phase.”
Autofixture.Xunit2 - “offers integrations with most major .NET testing frameworks.”
Autofixture.AutoNSubstitute - “offers integations with most major .NET mocking libraries.”
FluentAssertions - “Fluent Assertions is a very extensive set of extension methods that allow you to more naturally specify the expected outcome of a TDD or BDD-style unit tests.”

Since version 8, Fluent Assertions requires a commercial license.

FluentAssertions.OneOf - “improves the usage of OneOf to allow easier unit testing.”
Bogus - easily create fake data for your tests.
MELT - “MELT is a free, open-source, testing library for the .NET Standard Microsoft Extensions Logging library. It is a solution to easily test logs.”
ArchUnitNET - express & verify your architecture as unit tests.
bUnit - “is a testing library for Blazor Components.”
Mailpit - “email testing for developers”

Userinterface

Looking for things to spice up your userinterface?

Phospor - “is a flexible icon family for interfaces, diagrams, presentations — whatever, really.”
Iconify - over 200.000 open source vector icons.
Lucide - another set of open source icons.
FlatIcon - same.
Spectre.Console - “a .NET library that makes it easier to create beautiful console applications.”
Apache ECharts - “An Open Source JavaScript Visualization Library”
MudBlazor - A Blazor component library.
MVVM Toolkit - “A fast, modular, platform-agnostic MVVM library.”
AvaloniaUI - “The open-source WPF successor for .NET developers building beautiful, cross-platform applications.”
SukiUI - A desktop theme for AvaloniaUI
LiveCharts2 - Almost all software needs a chart
Bootswatch - “Free themes for Bootstrap. Simply download a CSS file and replace the one in Bootstrap.”

Logging / Performance

Logging and performance related tooling.

Serilog - “provides diagnostic logging to files, the console, and elsewhere.”
SerilogTracing - “a minimal tracing system that integrates Serilog with .NET’s System.Diagnostics.Activity”
SerilogAnalyzer - “Roslyn-based analysis for code using the Serilog logging library. Checks for common mistakes and usage problems.”
BenchmarkDotNet - “helps you to transform methods into benchmarks, track their performance, and share reproducible measurement experiments.”

Build / install related

Everything related to your build process and installer.

GitVersion - Use your Git version history to determine a semantic version number.

Beware that GitVersion needs access to your entire Git history. Some build systems only check out the latest commit to speed up the git clone. See the requirements for more information.

Wix - If you need to write an MSI-based installer.
Dotnet outdated - find out if your dependencies need updating.
CSharpier - “is an opinionated code formatter for c# and Xml.”
Banned API Analyzer - prevent the usage of certain classes/methods in your code.
Velopack - “Velopack is an installation and auto-update framework for cross-platform applications.”

Network stuff / messaging

All things related to networking and/or messaging.

YARP - a reverse proxy server.
mitmproxy - “a free and open source interactive HTTPS proxy.”
FastEndPoints - “a developer friendly alternative to Minimal APIs & MVC.”
MassTransit - “the trusted messaging framework powering mission-critical applications in more than 100 countries across industries like finance, government, logistics, healthcare, and technology”
Wolverine - “The messaging and web development framework that gets out of your way”
Brighter - “a framework for building messaging app with .NET and C#”
Darker - “The query-side counterpart of Brighter.”
MessagePack - “an efficient binary serialization format.”
EasyNetQ - “the leading client API for RabbitMQ on .NET”
MQTT Explorer - “An all-round MQTT client that provides a structured topic overview”
AsyncAPI - “Open-Source tools to easily build and maintain your event-driven architecture. All powered by the AsyncAPI specification, the industry standard for defining asynchronous APIs.”
Scalar - “Create world-class API Docs with a built-in interactive playground”
Mosquitto - “an open source message broker that implements the MQTT protocol versions 5.0, 3.1.1 and 3.1.”
NGrok - API gateway. Makes it possible to locally test your webhooks.

Databases

Everything related to data access.

SQLite EF Core Database Provider - Use EF Core with SQLite.
Npgsql Entity Framework Core Provider - Use EF Core with PostgreSQL.
EntityFramework.Exceptions - “Handle database errors easily when working with Entity Framework Core. Supports SQLServer, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle and MySql.”
EFCore.CheckConstraints - “Check constraints for Entity Framework Core”

Reporting

Sometimes you still need a printed report.

QuestPDF - “Generate and manipulate PDF documents in your .NET applications”

Wilbert van Dolleweerd – .NET Tool