As part of Microsoft’s move towards its cross-platform .NET offering, they have greatly simplified the project file format, and allowed a tight integration of third-party code generators with .NET projects. We are listening, and now proud to introduce integrated compilation of Protocol Buffer and gRPC service .proto files in .NET C# projects starting with the version 1.17 of the Grpc.Tools NuGet package, now available from Nuget.org.

You no longer need to use hand-written scripts to generate code from .proto files: The .NET build magic handles this for you. The integrated tools locate the proto compiler and gRPC plugin, standard Protocol Buffer imports, and track dependencies before invoking the code generators, so that the generated C# source files are never out of date, at the same time keeping regeneration to the minimum required. In essence, .proto files are treated as first-class sources in a .NET C# project.

Here is a high level overview of the gRPC Stacks. Each of the 10 default languages supported by gRPC has multiple layers, allowing you to customize what pieces you want in your application.

We are excited to announce the GA release of gRPC-Web, a JavaScript client library that enables web apps to communicate directly with gRPC backend services, without requiring an HTTP server to act as an intermediary. “GA” means that gRPC-Web is now Generally Available and stable and qualified for production use.

Channelz is a tool that provides comprehensive runtime info about connections at different levels in gRPC. It is designed to help debug live programs, which may be suffering from network, performance, configuration issues, etc. The gRFC provides a detailed explanation of channelz design and is the canonical reference for all channelz implementations across languages. The purpose of this blog is to familiarize readers with channelz service and how to use it for debugging issues. The context of this post is set in gRPC-Go, but the overall idea should be applicable across languages. At the time of writing, channelz is available for gRPC-Go and gRPC-Java. Support for C++ and wrapped languages is coming soon.

In a previous article, we explored how HTTP/2 dramatically increases network efficiency and enables real-time communication by providing a framework for long-lived connections. In this article, we’ll look at how gRPC builds on HTTP/2’s long-lived connections to create a performant, robust platform for inter-service communication. We will explore the relationship between gRPC and HTTP/2, how gRPC manages HTTP/2 connections, and how gRPC uses HTTP/2 to keep connections alive, healthy, and utilized.