Orleans Chat Room sample

Browse code

This sample uses Orleans Streaming to build a basic chat application. In this application, each client can:

• Set their name
• Join and leave a channel
• Send and receive messages in that channel
• List the channel members
• Display the channel's chat history

Each chat channel has a corresponding ChannelGrain which is identified by the channel's name, and a stream which is identified by a Guid generated by that grain. Clients connect to the ChannelGrain for a channel and then subscribe to the stream identified by the Guid returned from the IChannelGrain.Join call.

Sample prerequisites

This sample is written in C# and targets .NET 9.0. It requires the .NET 9.0 SDK or later.

Building the sample

To download and run the sample, follow these steps:

1. Download and unzip the sample.
2. In Visual Studio (2022 or later):
   1. On the menu bar, choose File > Open > Project/Solution.
   2. Navigate to the folder that holds the unzipped sample code, and open the C# project (.csproj) file.
   3. Choose the F5 key to run with debugging, or Ctrl+F5 keys to run the project without debugging.
3. From the command line:
   1. Navigate to the folder that holds the unzipped sample code.
   2. At the command line, type dotnet run.

Running the sample

First, start the server in one terminal window by executing the following:

dotnet run --project .\ChatRoom.Service\

Then, once the server has started, open one or more terminal windows and execute the following in each:

dotnet run --project .\ChatRoom.Client\

The clients will print instructions to the terminal which tell you how to interact with the sample.