🎁 Top 15 open-source projects every .NET web developer should know

As a small New Year’s gift for the //devdigest community, our editor Vlad Furdak has carefully prepared this curated list — a selection of materials to wrap up the year, catch up on what you might have missed, and start the new one with fresh ideas and inspiration.

🧪 Demo-projects

⏺ eShop (Microsoft)
A production-ready reference app from Microsoft showing how to use .NET Aspire, built with a microservice architecture.

⏺ ASP.NET RealWorld example app
A sample project built with ASP.NET Core (feature-oriented), including CRUD, auth, routing, pagination, and more

📚 Cookbooks & practical “recipes”

⏺ ASP.NET Cookbook (Practical ASP.NET Core)
Hands-on examples across many ASP.NET Core topics: middleware configuration, authentication, caching, routing, Minimal APIs, YARP, etc.

⏺ ORM Cookbook
A collection of code recipes for ORM frameworks: EF / EF Core, Dapper, NHibernate, ServiceStack ORM, Linq2DB, LLBLGenPro, and more.

⏺ MAUI Samples
35 MAUI sample projects - very helpful for learning MAUI.

⏺ Milan Jovanović code samples (repositories)
Tons of useful examples on many topics that are practical for real commercial .NET development.


🏗️ Clean Architecture (guide + template/boilerplate)

⏺ Clean architecture implementation example (Clean Architecture Manga)
Source code + a mini-book about application architecture. Clean Architecture implemented with .NET Core + React.

⏺ Clean architecture boilerplate (Jason Taylor - CleanArchitecture)
A template for a straightforward, efficient approach to enterprise app development using Clean Architecture and ASP.NET Core.

🧩 Sample business apps (DDD / CQRS / Event Sourcing)

⏺ POS application
Demonstrates CQRS, Event Sourcing, Generic Repository, Unit of Work, DDD, Ocelot API Gateway, Kafka.

⏺ Merp
Event-based Micro ERP using ASP.NET Core 3.1.

💬 Community apps (forum/blog)

⏺ POPForums
Forum + Q&A app with real-time updates, image uploads, and private message chat in multiple languages

⏺ POPBlog
From the creators of POPForums: a lightweight blog app using ASP.NET.


🎵 Blazor / WASM real-world app

⏺ MLocker
A browser-based music player built with ASP.NET + Blazor WASM.

🛒 E-commerce platforms (used in production)

⏺ GrandNode
A powerful, scalable e-commerce platform built with MongoDB.

⏺ nopCommerce
The legendary open-source e-commerce engine built with ASP.NET.

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