Every .NET project reaches the point where you're about to hand-roll something a well-maintained package already does better — retry logic, structured logging, validation, test data. The right dependency is the code you never have to own.
These twenty packages quietly replace hundreds of lines you'd otherwise have to write, test, and maintain yourself. The full article covers the fifteen I reach for on almost every project — EF Core, Dapper, Serilog, FluentValidation, xUnit, Polly, StackExchange.Redis, SignalR, Scalar, Bogus, Quartz.NET, Humanizer, MailKit, ImageSharp, and BenchmarkDotNet — plus five situational ones: Hangfire, MediatR, OpenTelemetry, Refit, and Microsoft.Extensions.AI.
Read the full article on Medium.
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