How can I get GRPC to play nicely with C# POCOs?

Question

So, here's the thing: I am trying to work myself into GRPC for communication between webservices. However, I am not quite sure how I can get C# POCOs to play nicely with GRPC messages.

I downloaded the example provided in the GRPC tutorial here: https://github.com/grpc/grpc and built it in order to be able to inspect what exactly GRPC is generating, and what I end up with is basically a huge chunk of boilerplate GRPC code.

However, I am trying to add GRPC to an existing application, for which I already wrote POCOs which I previously used with WCF, so I am not really looking forward to deleting my existing POCOs in order to exchange them for something I can't really add custom code to and which is kind of only there as long as I will be using GRPC.

So, here is the question - Can I somehow get GRPC and my existing POCOs wired together, or would I have to cast every object after receiving / before sending it?

Answer 1

As of today there's no way to auto generate a gRPC service from existing c# POCOs. There is recent github issue that brings up this use case though https://github.com/grpc/grpc-dotnet/issues/68 .

I imagine it won't be too difficult to introduce some sort of shim layer to translate the auto generated profobuf models to your POCOs?