gRPC with Legacy .NET Framework

Question

Everything I've seen around gRPC seems to be in Dotnet Core.

I'm unfortunately constrained to using .NET Framework as I'm working on a legacy app.

I'd like to add some gRPC endpoints to it.

Can this be done in any reasonable way?

Answer 1

The Grpc.Core pacakage contains the (legacy) unmanaged client and server code and can be used on .NET Framework; typical usage would be:

Server server = new Server
{
    Ports = { new ServerPort("localhost", 10042, ServerCredentials.Insecure) },
    Services = {
        Calculator.BindService(calc),
        TimeService.BindService(clock),
    }
};
server.Start();
Console.WriteLine("Server running... press any key");
Console.ReadKey();
await server.ShutdownAsync();

A client would be more like:

var channel = new Channel("localhost", 10042, ChannelCredentials.Insecure);
try
{
    var calc = new Calculator.CalculatorClient(channel);
    for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++)
    {
        using var ma = calc.MultiplyAsync(new MultiplyRequest { X = i, Y = i });
        var calcResult = await ma.ResponseAsync;
        Console.WriteLine(calcResult.Result);
    }



    var clock = new TimeService.TimeServiceClient(channel);
    using var subResult = clock.Subscribe(new Empty());
    var reader = subResult.ResponseStream;
    while (await reader.MoveNext(default))
    {
        var time = reader.Current.Time;
        Console.WriteLine($"The time is now {time}");
    }
}
finally
{
    await channel.ShutdownAsync();
}

So: yes.