Open-source has entirely change the programming and developers world. Today you can create any application, game, mobile app without spending a single penny. Thanks to open-source software and awesome community of developers and people behind them. As a .NET developer I have been developing enterprise applications for quite a long time and now I have shifted my focus towards developing products and understanding what it takes to make a successful product launch.
Back then, I used to spend most of my time in investigating the new technologies and what technology we should be using to get this thing done. I still do that today, not because it is the requirement of the project but because I have been asking a lot of questions. The list of projects I have compiled below are the projects that have helped me in learning lots of new things and insights of the programming and I hope this does the same for you as well. Here is the list of awesome open-source project that you should be following on Github.
Pinta
We all know about Paint.net, it is an awesome tool and a complete replacement of Photoshop (at least for me). And yet there is another project which is almost the same and open-source and it works on Linux and Mac. It uses Gtk# (Gtk sharp) to run on both Window and Linux platforms. This project is a must have if you are a .NET guy and want to get yourself into some serious programming. You will learn about the insights of using gtk# in your projects. Though Microsoft already took the steps to have .NET FX on Linux but still this project is a great learning source.
Official site: http://www.pinta-project.com/
Github: https://github.com/PintaProject/Pinta
ShareX
I take a lot of screen shots and record screen casts as well for my personal use. But I used to use two different tools to get the work done. This is one of the tools that will not just take screen shots or just let you record your screen casts easily, it will also allow you to upload them to the 40 different image storing cloud services. Dive into the source code and see the awesomeness under the hood. Here is the project description as seen on Github.
ShareX is an open source program that lets you take screenshots or screencasts of any selected area with a single key, save them in your clipboard, hard disk or instantly upload them to over 40 different file hosting services. In addition to taking screenshots, it can upload images, text files and all other different file types.
Official site: https://getsharex.com/
Github: https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX
StackExchange - Data Explorer
You got a programming question, you Google it and it redirects it to StackOverflow. StackOverflow needs no introduction among programmers. StackOverflow is one of the Q&A site dedicated to the developers to get the answers for their problems. But it is just one site. In the recent years StackExchange has grew up and not just providing support for programmers but also helping folks from other fields. Now the data StackExchange has is available for anyone out there for free under creative-commons. If you are interested in looking into the source code that powers the user to query that immense amount of data bank then head over to Github and fork this project. StackExchange is all about Microsoft stack and this tool is also written in ASP.NET MVC3.
Official App: https://data.stackexchange.com/
Github: https://github.com/StackExchange/StackExchange.DataExplorer
MiniBlog
This is the minimalistic blog engine written in ASP.NET web pages by the author of BlogEngine.NET, Mads Kristensen. I started my bog with BlogEngine.NET and I had an amazing experience with it. MiniBlog is totally different in terms of features that are offered by BlogEngine.NET. This project will tell you the power of web pages and how you can write your own simple site without wasting much time.
Demo: http://miniblog.azurewebsites.net/ (with user name and password as demo).
Github: https://github.com/madskristensen/MiniBlog
Fluent Scheduler
If you want to run cron jobs or automated jobs in your application quietly, then this is the library you should be using. The documentation is pretty sleek and get you started in no time. But other than that you should take a look at the source code and see how nicely this has been done.
Github: https://github.com/jgeurts/FluentScheduler
Dapper
A Micro-ORM used by StackExchange sites. This is a perfect replacement for EF. This is just a single file that you can drop in your project and get started.
Dapper is a single file you can drop in to your project that will extend your IDbConnection interface.
Github: https://github.com/StackExchange/dapper-dot-net
LINQ-toWIKI)
A .NET library to access MediaWiki API. The library is almost 3 years old but the source code will worth the look. Excerpt from Github:
LinqToWiki is a library for accessing sites running MediaWiki (including Wikipedia) through the MediaWiki API from .Net languages like C# and VB.NET.
It can be used to do almost anything that can be done from the web interface and more, including things like editing articles, listing articles in categories, listing all kinds of links on a page and much more. Querying the various lists available can be done using LINQ queries, which then get translated into efficient API requests.