3 new free tools for .NET developers

Earlier this year I blogged about 6 free tools for .NET developers that we have developed internally at elmah.io and made public through our website. We cannot stop publishing helpful tools and the total tool count is 9 now, all available on the tools page. This post is a follow-up with the latest three tools in the batch.

Appsettings.json Transform Tester

Like back in the days with Web.config transformations, .NET Core/.NET 5/.NET 6 has its own transformation feature based on Appsettings.json files. Using the Appsettings.json Transform Tester, you can quickly test and inspect the JSON merge made when including both an appsettings.json and appsettings.production.json file.

Base64 Image Encoder

As you probably already know, images can be embedded into different text formats using a base 64 representation. While often used to include smaller images directly in HTML or CSS, base 64 encoded images can also be included in exchange formats like XML and JSON. We developed the Base64 Image Encoder to have a very fast tool available, that would output example code for multiple formats.

MD5 Encoder

Sometimes you just need a quick way to MD5 encode a string. This could be for encoding an email to Gravatar or to encrypt a value for an ASP.NET Core URL. With the MD5 Encoder tool, encoding a string is super fast and you even get C# example code to copy and paste directly to your own project.

That's it - for now! Any ideas for other tools that you could use, make sure to reach out.