Open Source

Microsoft continues its commitment to open source. We not only host projects at the CodePlex forge and support many open source projects, but we also create our own open-source projects that the community can improve and extend. In addition to Microsoft-supported open source projects, there are thousands of great open source projects, applications, and libraries that you can use with ASP.NET today. Here you'll find a few of our favorites. If you're looking for Samples, there's lots of samples here as well as on http://code.msdn.microsoft.com. We'll update these pages as we come upon other cool projects. - Jon Galloway and Scott Hanselman

Glimpse

At its core Glimpse allows you to debug your web site or web service right in the browser. Glimpse allows you to "Glimpse" into what's going on in your web server. In other words what Firebug is to debugging your client side code, Glimpse is to debugging your server within the client.

.less

Write regular CSS with your .NET apps, then add a few variables, mixins and nested rules. “.less” (pronounced dot-less) is a .NET port of the funky ruby LESS library.

DotNetOpenAuth

DotNetOpenAuth is a well-established open source library that bring OpenID, OAuth, and ICard capabilities to the Microsoft .NET Framework.

ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization

The ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization framework is designed to decrease the amount of time required to request and display a page from a web server by performing a variety of optimizations on the page’s images.

jQuery

jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

ELMAH

ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) is an application-wide error logging facility that is completely pluggable. It can be dynamically added to a running ASP.NET web application, or even all ASP.NET web applications on a machine, without any need for re-compilation or re-deployment.

Mini Profiler

A simple but effective mini-profiler for ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET. It does not attach itself to every single method call. Instead, it provides: an ADO.NET profiler and a pragmatic Step instrumentation that you can add to code you want to explicitly profile.

Massive

Massive is a "wrapper" for your DB tables and uses System.Dynamic extensively. Drop the code file into your app and change it as you wish. It’s a micro-ORM that hides some things and embraces others.

Dapper

Dapper is a single file you can drop in to your project that will extend your IDbConnection interface. It’s a “micro-ORM” for people who love SQL.

n2cms

N2 is a lightweight CMS framework. With just a few strokes of your keyboard a strongly typed model emerges complete with a management UI.

Chirpy

Chirpy mashes, minifies, and validates your javascript, stylesheet, and dotless files, and can also auto-update T4MVC and other T4 templates.

Combres

Combres is a .NET library which enables minification, compression, combination, and caching of JavaScript and CSS resources for ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC web applications. Simply put, it helps your applications rank better with YSlow and PageSpeed.

Microsoft Ajax Minifier

The Microsoft Ajax Minifier enables you to improve the performance of your web applications by reducing the size of your Cascading Style Sheet and JavaScript files.

WebformsMVP

A simple Model-View-Presenter framework for ASP.NET Web Forms to aid in building testable and maintainable ASP.NET projects.

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit maintained by DevExpress

The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is a classic set of over 40 ASP.NET WebForms extensions including Accordion, AutoComplete, Calendar, ColorPicker and many more. DevExpress has taken over the maintenance and released version 15.1 that brings the product back to a dependable and usable state.

ASP.NET Sprites Webforms Control

The ASP.NET Sprite Web Forms control allows you to use sprites and image inlining in ASP.NET 4 Web Forms projects.

CKEditor

CKEditor is a text editor to be used inside web pages. It's a WYSIWYG editor; the text being edited looks as similar as possible to the results users have when publishing it. It brings to the web common editing features found on desktop editing applications.