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Top 10 C# Libraries on GitHub Listed

Software analytics company OverOps has published a report on the most popular C# libraries as measured by usage statistics on the GitHub open source development platform and source code repository.

The survey, following last year's inaugural project, finds the top C# library of 2019 is Newtonsoft, also known as Json.NET, which held on to its top position from last year. The high-performance JSON framework for working with JSON in .NET is said to be up to 250 times faster than other serializers.

The full top 10 list includes:

  1. Newtonsoft.
  2. NzbDrone, a personal video recorder (PVR) for newsgroup users, which climbed its way up from No. 17 in 2018.
  3. Abp, ASP.NET Boilerplate, for Microsoft's framework designed for web applications.
  4. dnSpy, a .NET debugger and assembly editor that moved up from No. 9 in 2018.
  5. JetBrains' ReSharper, the Visual Studio extension for .NET.
  6. Cake, a cross-platform build automation system with a C# DSL.
  7. DotNetNuke, a web content management system that jumped from No. 14 in 2018 to No. 7 in 2019.
  8. Osu! an open-source rhythm game.
  9. NUnit, the unit testing library.
  10. Xunit, the open-source unit testing tool that dropped from the 4th place in the 2018 top libraries edition.

Big movers going up were: Orleans, an actor framework at No. 21 (previously No. 26); QuantConnect, a C#, F# and Python algorithmic trading platform, going to No. 24 (previously No. 41); and Avalonia, a cross platform XAML Framework, which leaped to No. 27 from No. 48).

Big movers going down were: Umbraco, a content management system, to No. 11 position from No. 7; ICSharpCode, integrated development environment, to No. 23 from No. 16; and Log4net, a tool to help the programmer output log statements, to No. 28 from No. 18.

"This year we were glad to see the high number of new libraries added to the mix," OverOps said. "Not entirely surprising, considering Microsoft's constant work towards supporting the open source community and ecosystem and, of course, the recent purchase of GitHub itself. Among the new libraries we could see some rising trends -- the most outstanding field is cryptocurrency, with a lot of new (and old) libraries meant to help users manage, monitor and even obtain digital 'coins'. Among other trends, we can see a rise in CMS libraries, as well as libraries which aim to help game developers, whether in creating mods or building new games from scratch."

The complete list of the top 100 C# libraries for 2019 on GitHub is available here.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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