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Building gRPC Services in .NET

gRPC is a high-performance, open-source RPC framework built on HTTP/2 that enables modern distributed systems to communicate efficiently. Unlike REST, which treats each call as a discrete transaction, gRPC leverages Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) for serialization and HTTP/2 multiplexing to achieve sub-millisecond latencies and reduce bandwidth consumption by up to 70%. In .NET, gRPC has become the industry standard for building microservices, with built-in support in .NET 5+ through ASP.NET Core.

This series guides you from foundational concepts through production-ready patterns. You'll learn how Protocol Buffers define service contracts, implement all four RPC communication patterns (unary, server-streaming, client-streaming, and bidirectional), and deploy resilient services with error handling, interceptors, and deadline enforcement. Whether you're migrating from REST or building your first microservices platform, this tutorial series provides hands-on, annotated code examples based on real-world scenarios that scale to enterprise deployments.

By the end of this series, you'll understand how to architect gRPC services that handle high-throughput, low-latency communication; integrate authentication and logging without duplicating code; and choose between gRPC and REST based on your application's specific constraints. All examples are written in C# for .NET 6+ and follow current best practices from Google Cloud, Azure, and production teams at scale.

Articles in this series​