Jim Galasyn shows how to use the Confluent.Kafka NuGet package to connect to a Kafka cluster from C#:
Sometimes you’d like to write your own code for producing data to an Apache Kafka® topic and connecting to a Kafka cluster programmatically. Confluent provides client libraries for several different programming languages that make it easy to code your own Kafka clients in your favorite dev environment.
One of the most popular dev environments is .NET and Visual Studio (VS) Code. This blog post shows you step by step how to use .NET and C# to create a client application that streams Wikipedia edit events to a Kafka topic in Confluent Cloud. Also, the app consumes a materialized view from ksqlDB that aggregates edits per page. The application runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with no code changes.
Now, if only the .NET package supported a bunch of stuff which has come out over the past few years (the big one being Streams)… That’s no knock on the maintainers, mind you—they’ve done a good job given available resources—but it’s still unfortunate. At least there’s an unofficial implementation and hey, the original Confluent.Kafka .NET package started out as one of those too.