No replacement for grpc.core for NET Framework on Windows 10

[Chris Husslack]

Hi All.

The grpc.core library will soon be obsolete as mentioned here. For NET Framework and NET Core the replacement for clients is grpc.net.client. Unfortunately for the NET Framework there are major limitations as listed here. This means that it is not possible to consume grpc services which only support HTTP/2 requests on Windows 10 using NET Framework. This is a major limitation. Windows 10 is still widely used. The migration from NET Framework to NET Core takes also time with a large code base. While Google stops the support for the NET ecosystem Microsoft does not pick it up completely.

May I ask the humble question to extend the support for grpc.core until Windows 10 is EOL?

[Jan Tattermusch]

Hi,

I understand that deprecating Grpc.Core will come with limitations for some users, but unfortunately it isn't always possible to make everyone happy. The article you linked tried to explain what lead us to the decision to eventually deprecate Grpc.Core in favor of grpc-dotnet and maintaining Grpc.Core takes effort (that could otherwise be spent on more forward-looking improvements to gRPC in .NET) and we believe that those arguments still apply.

TBH, this isn't really about having Windows 10 or newer, it's more about using the "legacy" .NET Framework or using the more modern .NET Core. grpc-dotnet has a full feature support on .NET Core (followed by .NET 5,6,..) and a much more limited feature support on the legacy .NET Framework and the version of Windows doesn't really change much in this picture.

While it is clear that not everyone have migrated to .NET Core by now (even though it existed for many years now and it's been heavily recommended by Microsoft), there is no clear deprecation date for the legacy .NET Framework in the foreseeable future (some say it will live "forever") and we have to draw a line somewhere. The blogpost you linked gave folks 2+ years notice to prepare for Grpc.Core being

deprecated (and we did our best to support Grpc.Core during this maintenance period) and we cannot support it forever (we already extended the support period by one year in 2022).

Hope this makes sense

[Jan Tattermusch]

Please see the latest update on Grpc.Core deprecation.