Millrace.Storage.SqlServer 1.1.0

Millrace

Status: 1.0. Jobs, workflows, sagas, both SQL providers, the dashboard and its three official UIs are built, tested and published. The storage contract and the v1 REST contract are now stable: they will not break within 1.x. That promise is the whole meaning of this version number, which stayed at 0.1.0-alpha until it could be made honestly. A SQLite provider has since landed on main and ships with the next release — it is listed below because it is what the package table will describe then. Start with the documentation, or with ARCHITECTURE.md if you would rather read the design.

Millrace is a durable job and workflow orchestration library for .NET — in-process, storage-agnostic, dashboard-included. The mental model: Hangfire's substrate with a real orchestration layer on top. A millrace is the engineered channel that carries water to the wheel: directed, sustained flow that does work.

• Durable jobs — persistent queues, retries with backoff, cron, delayed jobs, continuations. jobs.EnqueueAsync<IEmailSender>(s => s.SendAsync(orderId)).
• Workflows — code-first fluent graphs with parallel branches, sagas + compensation, strongly typed signals, durable timers. Every activity runs as a durable job and inherits retries, distribution, and observability.
• Storage as a plugin — the core has zero database dependencies; pick a provider package (PostgreSQL, SQL Server or SQLite) or write your own and verify it with the shipped conformance kit.
• Ops dashboard — mounted as middleware over a versioned REST + OpenAPI contract, with official React, Angular, and Blazor UIs.
• Modern .NET only, zero framework lock-in — net10.0, System.Text.Json, TimeProvider, OpenTelemetry-native. No application-framework dependencies (no ABP, no MassTransit): just the BCL and Microsoft.Extensions.*, with multi-tenancy and authorization hooks built in natively. MIT licensed.

Where it stands

Full documentation — guides and the generated API reference — is at https://inferenceailab.github.io/Millrace/; its source is docs/site.

Planned work lives on the project board, mirrored in docs/backlog.md. Unsettled design questions are tracked in docs/open-questions.md.

Measured against Hangfire and WorkflowCore in docs/benchmarks.md — method, caveats and a harness you can run yourself.

Install

dotnet add package Millrace
dotnet add package Millrace.Storage.PostgreSql

builder.Services.AddMillrace(millrace => millrace.UsePostgreSqlStorage(connectionString));

That is a working job substrate: enqueue, retries, cron, continuations, workflows. The dashboard is opt-in, and a UI is a separate package again — mount the API without one if you would rather build your own client against the REST contract.

builder.Services.AddMillraceDashboard();
builder.Services.AddMillraceReactUi();   // or AddMillraceAngularUi() / AddMillraceBlazorUi()

app.MapMillraceDashboard("/millrace");

The UI packages ship their bundle prebuilt, so installing one never requires Node, npm or a CDN.

Try it

dotnet run --project samples/Millrace.Sample.Api

Then open http://localhost:5000. No database, no broker, no sidecar — the bundled in-memory provider carries jobs, a workflow and the dashboard in one process. Add one connection string to run the same sample on PostgreSQL and watch jobs survive a restart. See samples/README.md.

Testing your jobs

Millrace.Testing runs work deterministically, so a test never polls or sleeps:

await using var millrace = MillraceTestHost.Create(
    services => services.AddScoped<IEmailSender, EmailSender>());

await millrace.Jobs.EnqueueAsync<IEmailSender>(s => s.SendAsync(orderId));
await millrace.RunUntilIdleAsync();

Assert.True(sent);

Delays, retry backoff and signal timeouts are reached with AdvanceTime rather than waiting — a seven-day timeout is one call.

Repository layout

src/      library packages (Millrace, Millrace.Storage.*, Millrace.Dashboard*, ...)
test/     unit and integration tests
samples/  runnable examples
bench/    benchmarks vs Hangfire and WorkflowCore (docs/benchmarks.md)
docs/     documentation

Building

dotnet build
dotnet test

Requires the .NET 10 SDK, and Node 22.22.3+ or 24.15.0+ (the Angular CLI's floor) — the React and Angular UI packages compile their embedded bundle during the .NET build. Consumers of the published package never need Node; that is the point of shipping the bundle prebuilt. To build the C# alone, pass -p:SkipUiBuild=true (the resulting package serves no UI).

The PostgreSQL conformance run needs Docker (Testcontainers). It is strict in CI: an unreachable database fails the run rather than skipping it.

The UI rendering tests need a browser, and follow the same rule. Install one once:

pwsh test/Millrace.Dashboard.BrowserTests/bin/Release/net10.0/playwright.ps1 install chromium

Without it they skip locally and fail in CI. Run them before touching a UI — they are the only check in the repository that executes a bundle rather than reading it.

License

MIT