Event Hubs .NET Standard client is now generally available

After several months of testing, both internally and by our users (thank you), we are releasing our newest Event Hubs clients to general availability. This means that these new libraries are production ready and fully supported by Microsoft.

What new libraries are available?

Consistent with our past design decisions, we are releasing two new NuGet packages:

1. Microsoft.Azure.EventHubs – This library comprises the Event Hubs specific functionality that is currently found in the WindowsAzure.ServiceBus library. In here you will be able to do things like send and receive events from an Event Hub.
2. Microsoft.Azure.EventHubs.Processor – Replaces functionality of the Microsoft.Azure.ServiceBus.EventProcessorHost library. This is the easiest way to receive events from an Event Hub, and keeps you from having to remember things such as offsets and partition information between receivers.

What does this mean for you?

Releasing these new libraries provides three major benefits:

1. Runtime portability – Using .NET Standard, we now have the ability to write a single code base that is portable across different .NET runtimes, including .NET Core, .NET framework, and the Universal Windows Platform. You can take this library and run it on Windows Server with .NET Framework 4.6, or on a Mac/Linux machine using .NET Core.
2. Open source – Yes! We are very excited that these new libraries are open source and available on GitHub. We love the interactions that we have with our customers, whether it be an issue or pull request.
3. Event Hubs now has its own library – while Event Hubs and Service Bus have been seemingly joined in the past, the use cases between these two products are often times different. Previously, you needed to download a Service Bus library in order to use Event Hubs. These new libraries are specific to Event Hubs, so we hope that they will make things more clear for our new users.

What's next?

For those of you currently using the WindowsAzure.ServiceBus library, we will continue to support Event Hubs workloads on this library for the foreseeable future. With that said, we currently have a .NET Standard Service Bus library in preview!

For more information on getting started with these new libraries , check out our updated getting started documentation.

So take the new libraries for a spin, and let us know what you think!