What are the big Open Source projects based on or intertwined with the Microsoft .Net Framework? I knew of a couple of projects. But, I had a hard time getting beyond my personal recollections when I searched using Google in various ways. So, here’s the list of .Net based Open Source projects that I could remember.
- DekiWiki: Wiki
- DotNetNuke: Web development framework
- Mono Project: .Net port for Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, Solaris
- Moonlight - Mono: Microsoft Silverlight port for Linux based on Mono
- Paint.net: Bitmap graphics editor
- SharpDevelop: IDE for C#/VB.net
- ZedGraph: .Net class library for charts and graphs
I guess I can also include…
…even though the .Net version has been abandoned when the project moved to Java.
So, what are the other popular Open Source projects based on .Net?
mojoPortal is an open source Content Management System and Web Site Framework built on C#/ASP.NET. It supports 5 different databases and can run on Linux using Mono
http://www.mojoportal.com
The ones I use: Npgsql (http://npgsql.projects.postgresql.org/) and mod_aspdotnet (http://sourceforge.net/projects/mod-aspdotnet); not sure if they are popular...
Castle Project and nHibernate.
Oh yeah, and nettiers, community server, subtext, dasblog, screwturn wiki...
Umbraco - http://www.umbraco.org
How about Lucene.NET?
I don't know whether it's as popular as the projects mentioned, but SubSonic probably ought to be on any list of high-quality .NET Open Source software. It automatically generates a complete data access layer for your .NET application, which can save many hours of tedious work on .NET 2.0 projects. You can use it with ASP.NET to work dynamically, or to create class files that you can put inside applications or supporting DLLs. It's very thoughtfully designed and actively maintained.
I haven't yet needed to use the Spring.NET framework, but after seeing a presentation on it I can understand why the Java version has become so important. Killer feature: it lets you write templates and definitions for any kind of .NET class and then automatically generates them for you...you can use it for data access classes, ASP.NET pages or whatever you like. If I was going to build a large .NET project from scratch today I would use Spring.NET from the outset.