C# is one of the most popular languages used by the developers, which implies it is very productive. To further improve the productivity of using C#, there are a lot of NuGet packages available.
In this blog, we discuss the 10 best NuGet packages for improving the productivity of developers when using C#:
RestSharp
REST stands for representational state transfer. RestSharp is the most popular HTTP client library for .NET. Using this library, C# developers can easily call remote resources over HTTP, and it takes care of serializing the request body to JSON or XML and deserializing them in the response.
The RestSharp NuGet package supports:
- Both synchronous and asynchronous requests.
- Both serialization and deserialization.
- Different HTTP request methods like GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE.
- A variety of authentications.
Total downloads: 109.9M
Json.NET
Json.NET is a free and open-source library in .NET with over 1 billion NuGet downloads. Its key features include:
- Serializing and deserializing any .NET object to JSON and JSON to .NET object.
- Conversion between XML and JSON.
- Using LINQ query against JObject, JArray, and JValue objects.
- 50% faster performance than DataContractJsonSerializer, and 250% faster than JavaScriptSerializer. (reference)
Total Downloads: 1.6B
Serilog
Logs are records of actions, exceptions, information, and warnings. Logging is an important factor in application development that helps developers to detect and resolve issues easily.
Serilog is a new logging framework used in .NET. It logs custom properties and data in JSON format.
When other logging tools provide the log data in unstructured format, Serilog provides structured logs. This also allows developers to easily record configured event data across consoles, files, and all types of storage systems.
Total downloads: 360.6M
NUnit
Testing plays a major role in software development to ensure the correctness of the code.
NUnit is an open-source unit-testing framework for all .NET languages, which includes C#. With NUnit, you can easily test large applications by breaking them into small modules. It helps us find issues even during the time of development.
Total downloads: 152.1M
Insight.Database
Insight.Database is a micro-ORM (object-relational mapping) for .NET that translates C# object data to database records and vice versa. It is a set of extension methods that makes handling databases easier in a C# application.
The primary features of Insight.Database include:
- Automatic open/close of database connections.
- Easy execution of stored procedures.
- Support for multiple result sets.
Note: To learn more about Insight.Database, refer to this GitHub page.
Total downloads: 686.5K
FluentValidation
FluentValidation is a .NET library for building strongly typed validation rules. It uses a Fluent interface and lambda expression to prepare the validation rules. The validation rules help maintain a clean domain code and make it more integrated. Also, it gives you a place to find the verification logic.
FluentValidation has numerous built-in validations such as null check, string empty validation, max length, and min length. It also supports a custom validator, customizing validation messages based on property name, providing messages based on localization, asynchronous validations, and so on.
Total downloads: 117M
Noda Time
Working with date-times and time zones in .NET is very painful. Noda Time fills the gap of .NET date-time operation and makes life easier. It gives different APIs to handle UTC, local dates, and local time zones. The clock service functionality easily converts local time to UTC and UTC to local time, thereby avoiding the major mistakes made by developers.
Total downloads: 45.7M
FluentEmail
FluentEmail is an open-source .NET library that allows you to ingrate email-sending functionality in your .NET application in 10 minutes. Use Razor to design the email templates and send the emails using SendGrid, MailGun, SMTP, and more.
Some of the most common functionalities available on the email object are To, From, CC/BCC, Subject, Body, Attach, UsingTemplate, and SendAsync.
Total downloads: 1.8M
Hangfire
Hangfire is an open-source framework that allows you to create, process, and manage background work. You can run your background jobs in the main process of your application without the need for a dedicated service.
Hangfire supports a wide variety of background tasks: short-run and long-run, CPU intensive and I/O intensive, one shot and recurrent.
Total downloads: 18.6M
LazyCache
Caching is a great way to improve the performance of an application. LazyCache uses a GetOrAdd format for caching, where you request an item from cache while providing the functionality to add it if the item is missing.
LazyCache is highly suitable for caching database calls, complex object graph building routines, and web service calls that may need to be stored temporarily for performance. It allows items to be cached for more or less time, but by default it saves the cached items for up to 20 minutes.
Key features of LazyCache are:
- It is thread-safe and concurrency-ready.
- Async compatible: lazy single evaluation of async delegates using the GetOrAddAsync() method.
Total downloads: 7.1M
Conclusion
Thanks for reading! In this blog, we have seen the 10 best NuGet packages for improving productivity when programing with C#. These packages reduce developing time and workload.
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