[paulirwin]

Avalonia is FOSS (MIT licensed). You only need Avalonia XPF if you are migrating legacy stuff.

Moq is largely unnecessary today with LLMs being able to easily generate mock classes. I personally prefer to hand-roll my mocks, but if you prefer the Moq-like approach, there's NSubstitute (3-BSD).

Automapper and MediatR are both libraries I avoided prior to the license change anyways, because I don't like runtime "magic" and not being able to trace dependency calls through my code. But, there is Mapster and Wolverine to fill those needs (both MIT). Wolverine can also replace much of MassTransit.

Telerik stuff - there are many good FOSS alternatives to these UI components; too many to list since it depends on which stack you're using.

PDF is indeed a sore spot. PdfPig is good, but limited in capability. I've started offloading PDF processing to a separate Python container with a simple, stateless Flask API with PyMuPdf.

> we have a problem with opensource being asymmetrically underfunded and if people going commercial is the cost perhaps we've failed.

Completely agree with this, though. My company and myself personally contribute a lot of time back to OSS, and I feel like that is part of the social contract of OSS. To have these libraries rug-pulled feels like a slap in the face as a OSS contributor and maintainer.

[Kwpolska]

I agree with almost all of this, especially MediatR being nonsense, but I would recommend against using a LLM to generate a mock. That’s just more code that you need to maintain and update on every interface change. NSubstitute is a fine library.

Another popular library that went commercial is FluentAssertions, Shouldly is a good open-source alternative.

[qingcharles]

PDF is an enormous festering wound in .Net. I've also been doing .Net since day one and never bought a single commercial component. Used it to build some massive commercial products all on OSS.

BUT. PDF has always been a nightmare. It's made a lot better in the last year since LLMs have vast knowledge of all the functions available in each of the .Net PDF OSS libraries and can usually find a way to do the thing I need now. (I've even had them just hack the PDF streams to do something when there is no library to do it as they know the whole spec)

[AshleyGrant]

Any recommendation of good alternatives to Telerik? We've been using it for years, but I'm open to considering alternatives even though it doesn't cost me anything to pay for the license.

[to11mtm]

Depends on what layer of Telerik [0]. Honestly of late since I'm extra rusty on frontend I just get Copilot with Claude to help generate UI widgets since that's allowed.

Before that, years ago, I just YOLOed with WebSharper and built composition helpers to make 'spartan but correct' UIs that could be prettied up with bootstrap if needed.

That said, alas, Bolero (what replaced WebSharper) is F# specific rather than also supporting C#.

I mostly bring those up because they have various libraries out there to work with different JS bits.

[0] - Cries in webforms

[AshleyGrant]

We're planning on using Blazor, so any Blazor UI components that you recommend?

[naasking]

MudBlazor is decent.

[ozim]

Wolverine replacing MassTransit yeah kind of works but just today I had to dive in and I did not like it.

“team decides” and I was busy with other stuff when they were doing evaluation.

But I would gladly pay the license there is just so much just working out of the box with mass transit you don’t realize until you miss it.

We use it with RabbitMQ.