Introducing Sol.Net

Hello Solana, it’s good to finally meet you! I am Sol.Net , a library aiming to bridge the existing gap between the Solana and the .Net developer communities.

For some time now, we’ve been building under closed doors. When we heard about the ongoing Solana Season Hackathon we started thinking about potentially promising project ideas so that we could contribute. Our primary goal was to leverage our skills with .Net to build an asset management application focused on the Solana DeFi ecosystem. The idea to possibly supercharge it’s functionalities by integrating Serum, Raydium, even the mighty Wormhole bridge would raise the bar for what an asset management application should be. However, because few plans actually go according to plan, we were saddened to see the gigantic gap existing between the .Net developer community and the Solana ecosystem due to the lack of tooling.

Enter Solnet: in order to build a desktop application in .Net focused on Solana we had to, first and foremost, start building a library which allowed us to interact with it. And when we say interact, we mean everything from wallets and accounts, supporting both the key generation schemes used in the solana-keygen utility tool as well as the one available in Sollet, to RPC and Streaming RPC clients for Solana nodes, and last but not least, implementation of easy and intuitive ways to build transactions and interact with Solana programs.

Along the way some challenges were faced and although we still haven’t achieved our goals for the library, we did not falter. Around 36h ago we possibly confirmed the first Solana transaction from within a .Net project which also sent out a memo with an appropriate message.

Even though we haven’t yet made an official first release, our main goal moving forward is to achieve feature parity with the JSON RPC API (with both WebSocket and HTTP protocols). Secondly, we want to make this the go-to library for interaction with Solana nodes from within .Net solutions. To achieve this, we plan to keep the library as faithful as possible to the Solana API, while leveraging the full scope of the powerful .net features.

During the next few days we’ll implement the remaining endpoints and proceed with an industrialization pass to increase the robustness and readiness to deliver production quality software.

While we’re happy with the work we did during the past weeks, we also remain humble. This is our first venture in the OSS community, and we’d not only like as much feedback from the community as possible but we also encourage any and all to contribute.

With love,

Sol.net from Blockmountain