Free software is not just a bunch of crazy people, who do not go beyond throwing command lines, but communities of restless minds, and since .NET is “the first great framework” and is a good product, the community has been created around it. Now we go a little beyond the framework, entering the life that is born near it.

Given the power that .NET gives us, tools are born around it to continue complementing it, of which we should also be very knowledgeable (at least of some).

  • NHibernate, a ORM, allows us to obtain an abstraction layer of the BDD, basically what it does is from each table in the DB we create an object with the functions that we are going to use against it, insert, update, delete, give meAllOdds, ……. and instead of having to deal directly with the BDD, we forget about having to open, close connections, the SQL statement. ….. and everything is done as if it were just another object.

We could say that it is “a step to humanize relational databases.”

  • Nvelocity, For the generation of code based on templates, in many cases the code generation is the same with some names changed, therefore with tools like these we can save many hours of work.
 VelocityEngine engine = new VelocityEngine();
 ExtendedProperties properties = new ExtendedProperties();
 properties.AddProperty("resource.loader", "assembly");
 properties.AddProperty("assembly.resource.loader.class", "NVelocity.Runtime.Resource.Loader.AssemblyResourceLoader, NVelocity");
 properties.AddProperty("assembly.resource.loader.assembly", "StencilFormatter");
 engine.Init(properties);
  • NUnit, is a framework for carrying out unit tests, highly recommended, since computers are for something, right? so that they work instead of us.

JUnit port (for Java) and has internal NUnit.Forms to perform them against Windows Forms and NUnit.ASP applications in testing web pages.

using NUnit.Framework;

[TestFixture] public class NUnitWikipediaExample { [Test] public void TestMultiplication() { Assert.AreEqual(4, 2*2, “Multiplication”); } }

  • NAnt, is a compilation automator, to be able to sleep while that macroproject is compiled. Great tool in the past, although in decline due to its main rival, the official tool for this from Microsoft: MSBuild, which has excellent integration with Visual Studio.

I predict a rebirth of the same, yes, closer to the Mono projects than to the .NET ones.

I would not like to close this post without mentioning other projects such as Log4NET and Castle Project, which although they do not belong to the N* group, are very powerful, and with the need to dedicate an individual article to each one.