Page 3 | Compare Business Software for Visual Studio: July 2025 Reviews & Comparison

HelpSmith

Complete help authoring tool to create CHM HTML Help files, Web Help systems, printed manuals, Adobe PDF documets, Microsoft Word documents, and ePub eBooks from a single source. If you are looking for a help authoring tool to create a CHM help file, online Web Help system, or PDF manual, you can consider HelpSmith which provides a rich feature-set from the powerful word processor to write help topics, to the built-in screenshot tool with the possibility to create help for dialog windows automatically. Using HelpSmith, you can create a CHM help file, a fully responsive Web Help system compatible with desktop computers and mobile devices, Printed Manual, PDF document, ePub eBook, and Microsoft Word document from a single source help project. You can write topic content using a built-in word processor that includes a spell checker with dictionaries available for many languages.

Starting Price: $199 one-time payment

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APIsec

Hackers are targeting loopholes in API logic. Learn how to secure APIs and prevent breaches and data leaks. APIsec finds critical flaws in API logic that attackers target to gain access to sensitive data. Unlike traditional security solutions that look for common security issues, such as injection attacks and cross-site scripting, APIsec pressure-tests the entire API to ensure no endpoints can be exploited. With APIsec you’ll know about vulnerabilities in your APIs before they get into production where hackers can exploit them. Run APIsec tests on your APIs at any stage of the development cycle to identify loopholes that can unintentionally give attackers access to sensitive data and functionality. Security doesn’t have to slow down Development. APIsec runs at the speed of DevOps, giving you continuous visibility into the security of your APIs. No need to wait for the next scheduled pen-test, APIsec tests are complete in minutes.

Starting Price: $500 per month

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SmartBear AQTime Pro

SmartBear

Debugging should be simple. AQTime Pro synthesizes complex memory and performance information into digestible, actionable insights so you can quickly find bugs and their root cause. Finding and squashing highly differentiated bugs is tedious and complicated, but AQTime Pro makes it easy. With over a dozen profilers, you can find memory leaks, performance bottlenecks, code coverage gaps and more in just a few clicks. AQTime Pro enables you to squash all bugs with one tool and get back to making high quality code. Don’t let code profilers box you in with a single codebase or framework and prevent you from finding performance bottlenecks, memory leaks, code coverage gaps unique to your project. AQTime Pro is the one tool to use across multiple codebases and frameworks in a project. It has broad language support for C/C++, Delphi, .NET, Java and more.

Starting Price: $719 one-time payment

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TestLeft

SmartBear

Build, test, and deploy new features in Eclipse, IntelliJ, and Visual Studio for agile development. Build, test, and deploy in one integrated development environment so you can focus on what matters, code. TestLeft is a developer automated testing tool that can be added to your integrated development environment (IDE) so you can immediately test the UI of new features right after they are built. TestLeft allows you to test at the unit and UI level so you can fix defects earlier in the product lifecycle to save time to let you code more. Without having to manually program descriptions for every object, you can start running functional tests sooner to accelerate your shift left efforts. You can add TestLeft to Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ or any other IDE. Avoid additional steps getting started by adding the TestLeft UI Spy into any preexisting DevOps pipeline. With support for Jenkins, Bamboo, and other popular CI/CD tools, you can test your application’s UI layer.

Starting Price: $1,345 per year

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froglogic Coco

froglogic

Coco® is a multi-language code coverage tool. Automatic source code instrumentation is used to measure test coverage of statements, branches and conditions. Executing a test suite against an instrumented application produces data that can later be analyzed. This analysis can be used to understand how much of the source code has been hit by tests, which additional tests need to be written, how the test coverage changed over time and more. Identify redundant tests, untested or dead code. Identify the impact of a patch on the code and code coverage & your testing. Coco supports statement coverage, branch coverage, MC/DC and other levels. Linux, Windows, RTOS and others. Using GCC, Visual Studio, embedded compilers and more. Choice of different report formats (text, HTML, XML, JUnit, Cobertura). Coco can also be integrated with various build, test and CI frameworks like JUnit, Jenkins and SonarQube.

Starting Price: €124.17 per month

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PHP Tools

DEVSENSE

PHP development environment. Turn Visual Studio into a powerful PHP development environment. The PHP Editor colorizes your code according to Visual Studio settings, giving you a better overview in the colors you are used to. The colors respect Visual Studio conventions with support for dark, light and 3rd party themes. Detect type mismatches, typos, missing function parameters, unknown classes and functions as you type. Code analysis periodically checks your code for various issues and underlines them immediately. This avoids having to handle most of the issues in run-time. The IntelliSense feature provides you with smart, context-aware code completions, detailed tool tips and function parameter assistance. The feature contains a complete PHP manual, learns from your code and performs type analysis. Its purpose is to minimize the amount of key presses you have to do.

Starting Price: $59/year/user

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GitHub Student Developer Pack

GitHub

Learn to ship software like a pro. There's no substitute for hands-on experience. But for most students, real-world tools can be cost-prohibitive. That's why we created the GitHub Student Developer Pack with some of our partners and friends. Everything you need for your virtual event. Design for engagement and we'll take care of the tools. The virtual event kit gives students the resources to make running online events simple and accessible. Everything you need to build your next website. Learn how to design and build your own website as you learn the basics of web development. The intro to web dev experience gives students the tools to start you on a path, no matter how much experience or technical knowledge you currently have. With the provided tools, anyone can create professional-looking graphics and designs. Featuring thousands of templates and an easy-to-use editor. Affordable registration, hosting, domain management, and much more.

Starting Price: $40 per year

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InstallShield

Revenera

Create native MSIX packages, build clean installs, and build installations in the cloud with InstallShield from Revenera. Consistent and reliable installs. Every time. With InstallShield, you’ll adapt to industry changes quickly, get to market faster and deliver an engaging customer experience. Revenera InstallShield (formerly Flexera InstallShield) is the fastest easiest way to build Windows installers and MSIX packages and create installations directly within Microsoft Visual Studio. Configure install conditions to specifically target Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022. Install files to native ARM locations on Windows 10 running on ARM machines. Easily move your build infrastructure to the cloud by connecting to Revenera’s Cloud License Server. Build one-click installers that are more modern than ever and refreshingly simple. Configure pre-requisites to install third-party packages from Microsoft’s Windows Package Manager.

Starting Price: $4,498 per 3 years

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Advanced Installer

Advanced Installer is a Windows installer authoring tool for installing, updating, and configuring your products safely, securely, and reliably. Businesses around the globe, large and small, save hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars by taking advantage of the expert knowledge built into Advanced Installer. User-friendly, completely GUI driven, with no scripts to learn, no databases to edit, and no XML to write. Save time to market. Develop with wizards, import existing IDE projects, and integrate them into automated build tools and source control systems. Hundreds of powerful features are ready to use with just a few mouse clicks. Tons of functionality is configurable for your installers. Fewer incidents due to improper installers. Enjoy reliable installers crafted with great attention to detail. Included updater, launcher, bootstrapper, trialware, serial validation, dialog editor, additional languages, and countless others.

Starting Price: $499 one-time payment

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NuGet

NuGet is the package manager for .NET. The NuGet client tools provide the ability to produce and consume packages. The NuGet Gallery is the central package repository used by all package authors and consumers. New to NuGet? Start with a walkthrough showing how NuGet powers your .NET development. Browse the thousands of packages that developers like you have created and shared with the .NET community. Want to make your first NuGet package and share it with the community? Start with our walkthrough! The command-line tool, nuget.exe, builds and runs under Mono 3.2+ and can create packages in Mono. Although nuget.exe works fully on Windows, there are known issues with Linux and OS X. The primary source for learning about a package is its listing page on NuGet (or another private feed). Each package page on NuGet includes a description of the package, its version history, and usage statistics.

Starting Price: Free

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ASP.NET Core

Microsoft

Millions of developers use or have used ASP.NET 4.x to create web apps. ASP.NET Core is a redesign of ASP.NET 4.x, including architectural changes that result in a leaner, more modular framework. ASP.NET Core 3.x and later can only target .NET Core. Generally, ASP.NET Core is composed of .NET Standard libraries. Libraries written with .NET Standard 2.0 run on any .NET platform that implements .NET Standard 2.0. There are several advantages to targeting .NET Core, and these advantages increase with each release. Tag Helpers enable server-side code to participate in creating and rendering HTML elements in Razor files. Built-in support for multiple data formats and content negotiation lets your web APIs reach a broad range of clients, including browsers and mobile devices.

Starting Price: Free

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ASP.NET

Microsoft

Blazor is a feature of ASP.NET for building interactive web UIs using C# instead of JavaScript. Blazor gives you real .NET running in the browser on WebAssembly. .NET is a developer platform made up of tools, programming languages, and libraries for building many different types of applications. ASP.NET supports industry standard authentication protocols. Built-in features help protect your apps against cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF). ASP.NET provides a built-in user database with support for multi-factor authentication and external authentication with Google, Twitter, and more.

Starting Price: Free

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CSS

CSS, short for Cascading Style Sheets, is a style sheet language used by web developers to structure the HTML and other elements of a website. CSS is one of the most widely used languages on the web. For style sheets to work, it is important that your markup be free of errors. A convenient way to automatically fix markup errors is to use the HTML Tidy utility. This also tidies the markup making it easier to read and easier to edit. I recommend you regularly run Tidy over any markup you are editing. Tidy is very effective at cleaning up markup created by authoring tools with sloppy habits. Each style property starts with the property's name, then a colon and lastly the value for this property. When there is more than one style property in the list, you need to use a semicolon between each of them to delimit one property from the next.

Starting Price: Free

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PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world. The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 8.0.20. When using the PHP.net website, there is even no need to get to a search box to access the content you would like to see quickly. You can use short PHP.net URLs to access pages directly.

Starting Price: Free

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Visual Basic

Microsoft

Visual Basic is an object-oriented programming language developed by Microsoft. Using Visual Basic makes it fast and easy to create type-safe .NET apps. Visual Basic focuses on supplying more of the features of the Visual Basic Runtime (microsoft.visualbasic.dll) to .NET Core and is the first version of Visual Basic focused on .NET Core. Many portions of the Visual Basic Runtime depend on WinForms and these will be added in a later version of Visual Basic. .NET is a free, open-source development platform for building many kinds of apps. With .NET, your code and project files look and feel the same no matter which type of app you're building. You have access to the same runtime, API, and language capabilities with each app. A Visual Basic program is built up from standard building blocks. A solution comprises one or more projects. A project in turn can contain one or more assemblies. Each assembly is compiled from one or more source files.

Starting Price: Free

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IronPython

IronPython is an open-source implementation of the Python programming language which is tightly integrated with .NET. IronPython can use .NET and Python libraries, and other .NET languages can use Python code just as easily. Experience a more interactive .NET and Python development experience with Python Tools for Visual Studio. IronPython is an excellent addition to .NET, providing Python developers with the power of the .NET. Existing .NET developers can also use IronPython as a fast and expressive scripting language for embedding, testing, or writing a new application from scratch. The CLR is a great platform for creating programming languages, and the DLR makes it all the better for dynamic languages. Also, the .NET (base class library, presentation foundation, etc.) gives developers an amazing amount of functionality and power. IronPython uses Python syntax and standard libraries and so your Python code will need to be updated accordingly.

Starting Price: Free

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Oxygene

RemObjects Software

Pascal is more relevant today than ever, and modern Pascal implementations such as Oxygene have a lot to bring to the table. Oxygene is a powerful general-purpose programming language, designed to let developers create all imaginable kinds of projects on a wide variety of platforms. To achieve this, it provides a combination of language features that ease the development processes, from basic object-oriented language concepts found in most modern languages (such as the concept of classes with methods, properties, and events) to sophisticated specialized language features that enable and ease specific development tasks (such as creating safe, multi-threaded applications), many of those unique to Oxygene. All of the provided features are based on the foundation of Object Pascal and stay true to the language design paradigms that make Pascal great, readable, and discoverable. As an object-oriented language, most code written in Oxygene lives in "classes".

Starting Price: $199 one-time payment

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TypeScript

TypeScript adds additional syntax to JavaScript to support a tighter integration with your editor. Catch errors early in your editor. TypeScript code converts to JavaScript, which runs anywhere JavaScript runs: In a browser, on Node.js or Deno and in your apps. TypeScript understands JavaScript and uses type inference to give you great tooling without additional code. TypeScript was used by 78% of the 2020 State of JS respondents, with 93% saying they would use it again. The most common kinds of errors that programmers write can be described as type errors: a certain kind of value was used where a different kind of value was expected. This could be due to simple typos, a failure to understand the API surface of a library, incorrect assumptions about runtime behavior, or other errors.

Starting Price: Free

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RemObjects Mercury

Mercury is an implementation of the BASIC programming language that is fully code-compatible with Microsoft Visual Basic.NET™, but takes it to the next level, and to new horizons. With Mercury, you will be able to build your existing VB.NET projects and leverage your Visual Basic™ language experience to write code for any modern target platform. You can mix Mercury code with any of the other five Elements languages in the same project if you like! The Mercury language will be deeply integrated into our development environments. Develop your projects in our smart yet lightweight IDEs, Water on Windows or Fire on Mac, with project templates, code completion, integrated debugging for all platforms, and many other advanced development features. Of course, Mercury will also integrate into Visual Studio™ 2017, 2019 and 2022. With Elements, all languages are created equal. Even within the same project, you can mix Mercury, C#, Swift, Java, Oxygene and Go.

Starting Price: $49 per month

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Synergy DBL

Synergex

Synergy DBL is a proven, ANSI-standard business language with class libraries, a high-performance database, and .NET interoperability at the heart of the Synergy/DE product suite. Flexible and reliable, it gives you the power to create scalable, portable enterprise applications and supports both object-oriented and structured programming techniques. Synergy DBL comes in two forms: traditional Synergy DBL and Synergy DBL for .NET. Traditional Synergy DBL supports numerous open technologies (including XML, HTTPS, SSL, and ActiveX) that allow you to interface with third-party applications and data. The multi-pass Synergy DBL compiler supports strong prototyping and other strict error-detection features. Synergy DBL for .NET enables you to create Synergy libraries and applications that run natively in the .NET framework, then extend your applications by taking advantage of .NET Framework libraries and third-party controls and interoperating with applications written in other languages.

Starting Price: Free

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XSharp (X#)

XSharp

X# is an open-source development language for .NET, based on the xBase language. It comes in different flavors, such as Core, Visual Objects, Vulcan.NET, xBase++, Harbour, Foxpro, and more. X# has been built on top of Roslyn, the open-source architecture behind the current Microsoft C# and Microsoft Visual Basic compilers. We have added a new options page (tools/options/text editor/X#) where you can control which suggestions the editor will suggest in the "general" code completion list. Code completion after a colon or dot will show namespaces, types, members, etc. And code completion after AS or IS will show types and namespaces. Several preprocessor fixes to make the preprocessor more compatible with FoxPro and Xbase++. We have also added the #if and #stdout commands. We added several smaller fixes in the RDD system to improve the compatibility with Visual Objects, XBase++ and FoxPro.

Starting Price: Free

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Oracle Data Access Components (ODAC)

Oracle

Oracle Data Access Components (ODAC) are a set of Windows and .NET data access drivers and tools. They include support for .NET data access, Microsoft Visual Studio tools for developing Oracle database applications; and ASP.NET providers. ODAC provides comprehensive client support for advanced Oracle database functionality, including performance, high availability, and security, among other features. It is tightly integrated with Visual Studio to provide a seamless development experience for developers. Oracle Data Provider for .NET is an implementation of Microsoft's ADO.NET interface and provides access to Oracle databases. OLAP Data Manipulation Language (OLAP DML) is used to define and manipulate analytic workspace objects. High performance, a feature-rich mechanism for Microsoft ADO and OLE DB data access to Oracle databases, its usage, and its configuration. Provides introductory, installation, post-installation configuration, and usage information.

Starting Price: Free

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PostgreSQL Data Access Components

Devart

Enjoy the highest performance and unlimited possibilities when working with PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL Data Access Components (PgDAC) is a library of components that provides native connectivity to PostgreSQL from Delphi and C++Builder including Community Edition, as well as Lazarus (and Free Pascal) on Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android for both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. PgDAC is designed to help programmers develop really lightweight, faster, and cleaner PostgreSQL database applications without deploying any additional libraries. PgDAC is a complete replacement for standard PostgreSQL connectivity solutions and presents an efficient alternative to the Borland Database Engine (BDE) and standard dbExpress driver for access to PostgreSQL. It provides direct access to PostgreSQL without PostgreSQL Client. PgDAC allows developers to optimize their database applications and harness the full capabilities of PostgreSQL.

Starting Price: $199.95 per year

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Bunifu Framework

Bunifu Framework UI tools provides you with all the tools you need to create modern desktop apps in less time. With Bunifu Framework UI tools, you get all the tools you need to maximize your creativity, make you more productive and save you money in Visual Studio .NET for C# and VB.NET. You are equipped to achieve any design you can think of with Bunifu Framework. You can do this using the custom properties included in each feature. The fast way to develop multiple views within a form or user control is by using Bunifu pages. With Bunifu Image Button, you can quickly add interactivity using animation to your images. Bunifu Shapes makes it possible to easily design different types of geometrical shapes. Simply show to rich context notification information using Bunifu Tooltip with events support.

Starting Price: $199 per year

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Essential Objects

Quickly extend your .NET application with PDF file generating/processing ability, or seamlessly integrate the popular Chromium browser engine both for UI or background task with extensive customization options such as custom resource loader and JavaScript extension. Not suitable for newer ASP.NET framework such as MVC, but perfect for maintaining legacy WebForm code/modules in a larger MVC application. Add browser capacity in Windows.Forms and WPF app simply by drag and drop. Extensive customization options for UI, resource loader and JavaScript interface. Support .Net Framework 2.0 and above, .NET Core 3.0 and above.

Starting Price: $799 one-time payment

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h5py

HDF5

The h5py package is a Pythonic interface to the HDF5 binary data format. It lets you store huge amounts of numerical data, and easily manipulate that data from NumPy. For example, you can slice into multi-terabyte datasets stored on disk, as if they were real NumPy arrays. Thousands of datasets can be stored in a single file, categorized and tagged however you want. H5py uses straightforward NumPy and Python metaphors, like dictionary and NumPy array syntax. For example, you can iterate over datasets in a file, or check out the .shape or .dtype attributes of datasets. You don't need to know anything special about HDF5 to get started. In addition to the easy-to-use high level interface, h5py rests on a object-oriented Cython wrapping of the HDF5 C API. Almost anything you can do from C in HDF5, you can do from h5py.

Starting Price: Free

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Go

Golang

With a strong ecosystem of tools and APIs on major cloud providers, it is easier than ever to build services with Go. With popular open source packages and a robust standard library, use Go to create fast and elegant CLIs. With enhanced memory performance and support for several IDEs, Go powers fast and scalable web applications. With fast build times, lean syntax, an automatic formatter and doc generator, Go is built to support both DevOps and SRE. Everything there is to know about Go. Get started on a new project or brush up for your existing Go code. An interactive introduction to Go in three sections. Each section concludes with a few exercises so you can practice what you've learned. The Playground allows anyone with a web browser to write Go code that we immediately compile, link, and run on our servers.

Starting Price: Free

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Windows Forms

Microsoft

Welcome to the Desktop Guide for Windows Forms, a UI framework that creates rich desktop client apps for Windows. The Windows Forms development platform supports a broad set of app development features, including controls, graphics, data binding, and user input. Windows Forms features a drag-and-drop visual designer in Visual Studio to easily create Windows Forms apps. Windows Forms is a UI framework for building Windows desktop apps. It provides one of the most productive ways to create desktop apps based on the visual designer provided in Visual Studio. Functionality such as drag-and-drop placement of visual controls makes it easy to build desktop apps. With Windows Forms, you develop graphically rich apps that are easy to deploy, update, and work while offline or while connected to the internet. Windows Forms apps can access the local hardware and file system of the computer where the app is running.

Starting Price: Free

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Liquid Studio

Liquid Technologies

Liquid Studio provides an advanced toolkit for XML and JSON development along with Web Service Testing and Data Mapping and Data Transformation tools. The Development Environment contains a complete set of tools for designing XML and JSON data structures and schemas. These tools provide editing, validating and advanced transformation capabilities. For novice or expert, the intuitive interface and comprehensive features will help you save time and money delivering a successful project. Visualize and edit an abstracted view of your XML schema(XSD) using an intuitive user interface, and validate your XSD against the W3C standards.Includes split graphical and text views, intellisense, syntax highlighting, drag and drop, copy and paste, and multi-step undo/redo. Visualize and edit an abstracted view of your JSON schema using an intuitive user interface, and validate your JSON Schema against the IETF standards.

Starting Price: $149 one-time payment

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SpecFlow

SpecFlow makes test automation easier by turning it into a team effort and allowing every role to better use their skills. Don’t waste your time searching for the correct definition across your binding classes, just right-click and jump to the relevant code. Hooks (event bindings) can be used to perform additional automation logic at specific times, such as any setup required prior to executing a scenario. SpecFlow supports a dependency injection framework that is able to instantiate and inject context for scenarios. This allows you to group the shared state in context classes, and inject them into every binding class that needs access to that shared state.

Starting Price: Free

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Business Software for Visual Studio - Page 3

Top Software that integrates with Visual Studio as of July 2025 - Page 3

HelpSmith

APIsec

SmartBear AQTime Pro

TestLeft

froglogic Coco

PHP Tools

GitHub Student Developer Pack

InstallShield

Advanced Installer

NuGet

ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET

CSS

PHP

Visual Basic

IronPython

Oxygene

TypeScript

RemObjects Mercury

Synergy DBL

XSharp (X#)

Oracle Data Access Components (ODAC)

PostgreSQL Data Access Components

Bunifu Framework

Essential Objects

h5py

Go

Windows Forms

Liquid Studio

SpecFlow