Using Code-First gRPC on .NET
Learn how to build gRPC applications by using the code-first approach.
The standard way of writing gRPC services is to manually write Protobuf files and then write their implementation in code. The main disadvantage of this process is that it's time-consuming. However, there's a way to write gRPC services without manually writing Protobuf definitions. It's called the code-first approach.
When we apply the code-first approach, all of our code is written in C#. We need to apply appropriate annotations to our classes. All the necessary gRPC components will be automatically generated for us once we compile our application. To learn how to use this approach, we'll apply some changes to the following setup.
<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
<PropertyGroup>
<OutputType>Exe</OutputType>
<TargetFramework>net6.0</TargetFramework>
<ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
<Nullable>enable</Nullable>
</PropertyGroup>
<ItemGroup>
<PackageReference Include="Grpc.Net.Client" Version="2.48.0" />
<PackageReference Include="protobuf-net.Grpc" Version="1.0.179" />
</ItemGroup>
</Project>
Adding the code-first gRPC contract
To start using code-first gRPC, we first need to add some NuGet libraries. We've done so to both of the project files. In the setup above, the BasicGrpcService.csproj file inside the BasicGrpcService project folder has a reference to the protobuf-net.Grpc.AspNetCore NuGet ...