Generate .proto files during build time from a .NET contract assembly

[rodrigovaras]

Hello,
I have a rather complex SDK framework where all of the RPC contracts were defined in C# and marked with DataContract & DataMember attributes. I have recently allowed our RPC services to allow serialize using protobuf protocol with good success.

I'm looking now for a way to produce valid and compatible proto files so we can have regular gRPC clients in other languages to interact with our services.

I understand some there is an API to allow the generation but i would prefer an msbuild task to do this job during build time like the opposite happen from .proto files to C#.
I'm missing a project that show this? Most of the discussion are related to the SchemaGenerator but mostly showing the way to write a tool or doing this on runtime.

Also i notice that most of the .NET API to generate proto is based on a [ServiceContract] attribute. Would like to know if there are other ways to trigger .proto generation for example a set of classes from a namespace regardless they participate on a service contract.
Thanks in advance,

[mgravell]

Right now, there's no inbuilt mechanism to do this. We have spiked the AOT work for protobuf-net (which shares 95% of the logic with this need) but that is paused at the moment (I've recently shipped Dapper.AOT, and will need to carry over a lot of the learning points from that to this). We're probably another 6 months out from having this, as it needs to come from my free/spare time, unless someone needs it urgently enough to sponsor it.

[rodrigovaras]

Thanks for the answer and looking forward if this feature become available at some point.

[blackshot]

+1 on this, this is the only thing preventing me for using protobuf-net in production, because one of the main features of grpc are contracts that can be used language agnostic. ¿How am i supposed to share contracts with my clients if they don't use C#?