Contributing to the .NET SDK

Guidelines for contributing to the Dapr .NET SDK

Welcome!

If you’re reading this, you’re likely interested in contributing to Dapr and/or the Dapr .NET SDK. Welcome to the project and thank you for your interest in contributing!

Please review the documentation, familiarize yourself with what Dapr is and what it’s seeking to accomplish and reach out on Discord. Let us know how you’d like to contribute and we’d be happy to chime in with ideas and suggestions.

There are many ways to contribute to Dapr:

If you’re new to the code base, please feel encouraged to ask in the #dotnet-sdk channel in Discord about how to implement changes or generally ask questions. You are not required to seek permission to work on anything, but do note that if an issue is assigned to someone, it’s an indication that someone might have already started work on it. Especially if it’s been a while since the last activity on that issue, please feel free to reach out and see if it’s still something they’re interested in pursuing or whether you can take over, and open a pull request with your implementation.

If you’d like to assign yourself to an issue, respond to the conversation with “/assign” and the bot will assign you to it.

We have labeled some issues as good-first-issue or help wanted indicating that these are likely to be small, self-contained changes.

If you’re not certain about your implementation, please create it as a draft pull request and solicit feedback from the .NET maintainers by tagging @dapr/maintainers-dotnet-sdk and providing some context about what you need assistance with.

Contribution Rules and Best Practices

When contributing to the .NET SDK the following rules and best-practices should be followed.

Pull Requests

Pull requests that contain only formatting changes are generally discouraged. Pull requests should instead seek to fix a bug, add new functionality, or improve on existing capabilities.

Do aim to minimize the contents of your pull request to span only a single issue. Broad PRs that touch on a lot of files are not likely to be reviewed or accepted in a short timeframe. Accommodating many different issues in a single PR makes it hard to determine whether your code fully addresses the underlying issue(s) or not and complicates the code review.

Tests

All pull requests should include unit and/or integration tests that reflect the nature of what was added or changed so it’s clear that the functionality works as intended. Avoid using auto-generated tests that duplicate testing the same functionality several times. Rather, seek to improve code coverage by validating each possible path of your changes so future contributors can more easily navigate the contours of your logic and more readily identify limitations.

Examples

The examples directory contains code samples for users to run to try out specific functionality of the various Dapr .NET SDK packages and extensions. When writing new and updated samples keep in mind:

  • All examples should be runnable on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. While .NET Core code is consistent among operating systems, any pre/post example commands should provide options through codetabs
  • Contain steps to download/install any required pre-requisites. Someone coming in with a fresh OS install should be able to start on the example and complete it without an error. Links to external download pages are fine.

Documentation

The daprdocs directory contains the markdown files that are rendered into the Dapr Docs website. When the documentation website is built this repo is cloned and configured so that its contents are rendered with the docs content. When writing docs keep in mind:

  • All rules in the docs guide should be followed in addition to these.
  • All files and directories should be prefixed with dotnet- to ensure all file/directory names are globally
  • unique across all Dapr documentation.

All pull requests should strive to include both XML documentation in the code clearly indicating what functionality does and why it’s there as well as changes to the published documentation to clarify for other developers how your change improves the Dapr framework.

GitHub Dapr Bot Commands

Checkout the daprbot documentation for Github commands you can run in this repo for common tasks. For example, you can comment /assign on an issue to assign it to yourself.

Commit Sign-offs

All code submitted to the Dapr .NET SDK must be signed off by the developer authoring it. This means that every commit must end with the following:

Signed-off-by: First Last flast@example.com

The name and email address must match the registered GitHub name and email address of the user committing the changes. We use a bot to detect this in pull requests and we will be unable to merge the PR if this check fails to validate.

If you notice that a PR has failed to validate because of a failed DCO check early on in the PR history, please consider squashing the PR locally and resubmitting to ensure that the sign-off statement is included in the commit history.

Languages, Tools and Processes

All source code in the Dapr .NET SDK is written in C# and targets the latest language version available to the earliest supported .NET SDK. As of v1.15, this means that because .NET 6 is still supported, the latest language version available is C# version 10.

As of v1.15, the following versions of .NET are supported:

Version Notes
.NET 6 Will be discontinued in v1.16
.NET 7 Only supported in Dapr.Workflows, will be discontinued in v1.16
.NET 8 Will continue to be supported in v1.16
.NET 9 Will continue to be supported in v1.16

Contributors are welcome to use whatever IDE they’re most comfortable developing in, but please do not submit IDE-specific preference files along with your contributions as these will be rejected.