Mission: A Business Devoted to Adding Value to the .NET Community
When I created ZZZ Projects in 2014, I had to choose a mission, a goal... a promise to fulfill in the future.
Since I like to help others, I thought, why not make this the mission: A business devoted to adding value to the .NET community.
At the beginning, our company had little to offer. But as time passed and our company grew, we found more ways every year to help developers worldwide.
How are we adding value to the .NET community exactly? Let's explore this together.
Sponsorship
Nowadays, it's rare to work on a project that doesn't use any open source library. One of the main advantages and disadvantages of using them is: They are FREE.
So how exactly is being free a disadvantage? Sure, it's free for companies to use them, but usually (99.99% of the time), those companies don't sponsor the owner of the library to help with maintenance. So after a few years, we find out:
- The library is no longer maintained
- Bugs are no longer fixed
- Questions are no longer answered
Time is money, so it's normal for the original owner of the library to have other priorities, like any of us.
ZZZ Projects adds value to the .NET community through sponsorship:
- Dapper: We provide a percentage of Dapper Plus revenue as our library exists because of its excellent work.
- LINQ Dynamic: We pay StefH directly for support and maintenance.
If our company continues to grow in 2024/2025, we plan to sponsor 5-10 more open-source libraries that I personally use for my projects.
Free Products & Features
Since we just spoke about open source libraries, ZZZ Projects owns and maintains several of them.
We add value to the .NET community by offering these libraries 100% free. A few people sponsor them (a big cheer to our current and past sponsors). Even though we have a few sponsors, it is not enough to cover the support costs, so we reinvest some profit from our paid products to keep our free products maintained.
Here is a list of our most popular free projects:
- Html Agility Pack: A library that helps parse HTML, downloaded over 150 million times.
- Entity Framework Plus: A library that provides additional features to EF Core, downloaded over 40 million times.
- Dynamic LINQ: A library that allows using LINQ dynamically, downloaded over 150 million times.
Our paid products also offer multiple free features:
- C# Eval Expression: Free to use for expressions with less than 50 characters and for LINQ Dynamic methods.
- Entity Framework Extensions: Single extension methods are free to use, along with some other features.
- Dapper Plus: Single extension methods are free to use, along with some other features.
We are particularly proud to see that all our free projects together have been downloaded over 500 million times! Talk about big numbers.
SQL and C# Online Compiler
Using an online compiler to create some code on the fly can be very useful when:
- You need to share a problem on Stack Overflow
- You need to quickly test something
- You want to try/learn a new language
Whenever you need to share something online, you can always count on these two compilers:
- .NET Fiddle: We are the co-owner of the most advanced C# online compiler.
- SQL Fiddle: We are the owner of the easiest-to-use SQL online compiler.
These two online compilers are 100% free as ZZZ Projects is behind them, paying for the server, development, and maintenance.
Online Tutorials
The first thing we do is search online for a tutorial whenever we want to:
- Learn something new
- Improve our skills
- Get a solution to a problem
ZZZ Projects maintain some of the best online tutorials, including our two major ones:
We strive to improve them and keep them up to date every year.
AI Tools
We just saw that ZZZ Projects provide some online tutorials, but more and more, people use AI tools such as ChatGPT to get their questions answered or to learn.
So, we also offer some tools:
- ZZZ Code AI: A major online tool that answers questions, generates code, and more.
- Free online chat on multiple websites such as SQL Fiddle, Learn Dapper, and Learn EF Core.
AI tools help thousands of people every day who either don't have access to ChatGPT due to country restrictions or want to share a solution online.
Just for Helping...
Finally, sometimes some companies just deserve to have a free license. They dedicate all their money to a good cause, so this is our way to help them accomplish their goals.
Conclusion
When I meet new developers who are not aware of us, it's always amusing to find out how much our impact touches their day-to-day life without them knowing we are behind it:
- Are they using .NET Fiddle?
- Are they using one of our free projects?
- Are they using a library we sponsor?
Indeed, ZZZ Projects have a few paid products, but when we zoom out, we can easily see that the ecosystem we have built touches almost every .NET developer at some point.
As our company continues to grow, we will keep striving to provide as much additional value as possible.
ZZZ Projects