5 stunning open-source C# projects
Recently, I’ve been going through some ups and downs in my coding life. You might have been there. You might have not. Quitting everything and becoming a goat farmer was briefly considered. And then dropped with the conclusion that on a day two or three a senior goat in chief would probably call for an urgent retrospective and demand daily stand-ups to make sure the quarterly hay targets are on track.
Instead of goat farming I opened up Github and started browsing projects looking for the inspiration to hit. And I’d love to share some of the nuggets I stumbled upon with you.
MarkovJunior — A probabilistic language based on pattern matching and constraint propagation
It can generate astonishing modern houses. And mazes, dungeons and other fun structures.
You might not use Maxim Gunmin’s language in your day to day CRUD app life but here is a nifty piece of computer science.
DevToys — A swiss army knife for developers
You might not use Markov algorithms in your day to day but you will have Etienne Baudoux’s swiss army knife on your hot key. It’s an extremely useful toolkit for daily dev tasks like encoding, testing regexps, formatting JSONs and many others. Instead of Googling a website and doing it there you can do this locally on your laptop.
Microsoft Power Fx
Microsoft Power Fx is a low-code general purpose programming language based on spreadsheet-like formulas. It is a strongly typed, declarative, and functional language, with imperative logic and state management available as needed. Written in C#.
Have a browse through the solution and the code. It’s nice to be able to do that with a language from the giant.
WPF UI — Fluent and modern UI library for WPF
This is a really nice UI library that doesn’t just look amazing but it’s also fast as. Like really fast as. Leszek Pomian wrote a beautiful monitoring app and while doing that .. “why not just” create a custom UI library, right? Be sure to check out his other projects too.
P2P Remote Desktop — A portable remote desktop with no configuration needed
While it might not have the looks of WPF UI this is a beautiful program nonetheless. It’s from Miroslav Pejic who specialises in writing P2P software. No need to install TeamViewers anymore.
Bonus: GlazeVM — A tiling manager for Windows
I know I said 5 projects but I don’t think you were counting, were you?
This i3 inspired tiling window manager by Lars Berger written in C# totally deserves to be here. Tiling managers are awesome for productivity especially when you prefer to keep your hands off your mouse.
If you liked some of these projects chances are that you will enjoy C# Digest — a free weekly newsletter for .NET developers.
What projects did I miss? And what are your favourites? Please share some of them in the comments bellow.
