A small set of MFC classes to add GUI elements similar to those in Office XP to MFC applications. Namely, the flat, non-3D, “water-color” UI controls, which have no raised edges, do not look “pushed in” when clicked, and are not “shadowed”.

SourceGrid 1.2.11.0 is a grid control that adds basic unbound data capabilities to .NET Windows Forms applications. Some believe the DataGrid and DataSet classes of the .NET Framework are not flexible enough. SourceGrid allows simple data to be displayed, without relying on XML. Useful for simple apps, it lacks features such as databinding, WYSIWYG design-time and printer support, as well as grouping and master/detail capabilities.

A security toolkit letting even less experienced programmers add encryption and authentication services to their apps, features that are becoming indispensable. The library hides low-level details of security from developers. It supports a variety of algorithms for symmetric/asymmetric encryption, authentication, and hashing. The library is free for non-commercial/shareware projects. It is written in C. ActiveX and C++ wrappers are available.

The SMTPClient component from Bossware is a .NET SMTP client that allows developers to implement outgoing email functions for their email applications and Web pages. It does not use the .NET Framework's System.Web.Mail namespace, which is merely a wrapper for CDONTS and CDOSYS, and which is reputed to be resource-hungry and to behave differently depending on the OS of the computer. The component is written in 100% managed C# and is CLS compliant.

With Lumisoft’s UI Controls 0.11, developers can choose from over a dozen basic flat controls for Windows Forms apps. The library seems occasionally somewhat buggy. With one control, the code generated when it is dragged onto a Form will not compile. The controls can be configured using the Property tab in VS.NET, but lack advanced WYSIWYG design-time support databinding capabilities. The code is written in C#.

With the Open SSL 0.9.7c library, developers can write applications that take advantage of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3), Transport Layer Security (TLS v1), and a full-strength general-purpose cryptography library. Security features such as data integrity, authenticity, and privacy can be implemented. To compile for Win32, Perl or compiling under Cygwin is required. Some of the encryption routines/algorithms are covered by patents.

Microsoft’s .NET Framework lacks classes for FTP. With KCommon’s FTP component, programmers can build Windows Forms or ASP.NET (Web Forms) apps so users can send or receive files via the FTP protocol. Operations for synchronous and asynchronous transfers are supported. KCommon’s FTP component supports passive mode, but not active mode. It is written in C# but is not marked as CLS compliant. It does not support proxy servers.

A digital audio processing .NET class library that lets developers create their own sound filters or use the ones implemented by the author, such as Gain, Delay, and Reverb, as well as the ability to read and write .WAV files. The library tries to be as systematic as possible; most classes inherit from the SoundObj class. It is not a strong-named assembly so it can’t be registered in the Global Assembly Cache. It is not marked as CLS compliant.

The FreeTextBox control provides a WYSIWYG HTML editing environment for ASP.NET (Web Forms) Web pages. Users can edit text and click on buttons to format their text. The control is written in C# and has many options for customization. It can be validated using standard ASP.NET validators. The code is not marked CLS compliant. MSHTML is reputed to make changes to HTML code, such as changing relative URLs to absolute; using the control avoids this.

The Whois component by Viascape, for the .NET Framework, performs synchronous queries using a Lookup method and asynchronous lookup queries using BeginLookup/EndLookup methods. Asynchronous calls can receive notification through a callback method. The whois component supports the RFC-954 Whois protocol, and can look up information for user, mailbox or domain. The code is written in 100% managed C# and is marked as CLS compliant.

Zlib is a free general-purpose data-compression library. Integrity checks performed with the CRC-32 or the ADLER 32 checksums. In-memory operations use the zlib compressed data format (RFC 1950). Deflate (RFC 1951) is used for its compression algorithm. Typical compression ratios are between 2:1 and 5:1. The gzip format, RFC 1952, is supported for compressing files on a file system. Lacks support for PKZip 4.5, BZip2, and Deflate64.

SharpZipLib is a free, open-source compression library for .NET. It supports Zip, Gzip, Tar, and Bzip2, and also computes checksums. The library currently lacks Zip file splitting/spanning, customizable self-extracting Zip files, and reading and writing directly to memory. It is ported from the GNU Classpath Zip library for Java. The library and source code is distributed under the GNU General Public License, with an exception.