This is a small example where two simple applications serve as producer and consumer for Kafka, respectively. The applications don't mind about topic partitions as they were developed just to showcase how easy using Kafka with .NET is, specially with the Confluent.Kafka package.
First, we need Kafka to be running for both applications to work. We will be using the bitnami/kafka:latest Docker image specified in the docker-compose.yml. To spin up the container, we just need to run:
# When using an older version of docker, run docker-compose up instead
docker compose upThe solution file already references the two projects, so we can build both for debugging by running dotnet build, but we can also build and run by using both:
dotnet run --project Example.ConsoleProducer
dotnet run --project Example.ConsoleConsumerNote: The consumer will throw an error if started first because the Kafka container needs the topic to be created before it can serve the messages. Running the producer first automatically creates the topic and sends the messages.
Now everything should be running and everytime we execute the producer application now, we will see the messages being received by the consumer almost instantly!