𝟭𝟱 .𝗡𝗘𝗧 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀 & 𝗹𝗶𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝘀

I asked r/dotnet one question: which .NET libraries do you actually use that nobody talks about?

The thread got hundreds of replies. Here I filtered for the ones with 10+ upvotes.

CSharpier got 62 votes. Refit was second. Then a bunch of tools sitting between 30–31 votes, most of which most developers either don't know or never mention in tutorials.

A few things stood out to me:

The community is now skeptical of dependencies. FluentAssertions, IdentityServer, and MediatR, we are not sure about it. The most upvoted non-library comment was: "Batteries included, stay away from dependencies." That context matters when you read this list.

LINQPad isn't a NuGet package, but it kept coming up. Teams build entire support workflows in it.

Vogen surprised me. Type-safe value objects generated at compile time, without runtime costs. I've seen orderId/customerId bugs in production. This solves such kinds of problems.