As many of you know, I am an un-ashamed .NET developer on the Windows platform. Seeing that I do a lot of SQL Server development my development and OS platforms of choice is sufficient for my work, as I on my development box (Windows of course) install SQL Server Developer edition and whatever .NET framework I use.
That has been sufficient up until now when I want to develop against Kafka. At Derivco we are getting more and more interested in Kafka, and obviously, I want to install it so I can play around investigate it. However, to install it on my development machine as I would typically do with technologies I am interested in, SQL Server, RabbitMQ, etc., is difficult, if not impossible.
NOTE: Yes I know, there are articles on the web discussing how to run Kafka on Windows, but it is a hit and miss whether it works.
A while ago I wrote a post about how to run Kafka under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), and yes it works, but I have had issues with it, and to me, it is still a hack. So the options then (if we rule out WSL) are:
- Running it on a Linux in a virtualized environment, (Virtual Box, VMWare, Hyper-V, etc.).
- Docker.
The rest of this post goes through how to set up the Confluent Platform in a Docker environment and use it from .NET.