Create a Flow Library

The heart of the Didact Platform are your jobs which we call Flows. The Flows must exist in a dedicated class library project which we will call your Flow Library going forward. In this guide, I walk you through how to create and prepare a class library for Flow design.

New class library project

To get started, you first need to create a new, dedicated class library dotnet project.

We will utilize the dotnet CLI for easy, cross-platform usage; however, feel free to use Visual Studio or any other IDE of your choice if you prefer a GUI over a CLI.

1. Open a terminal on your machine.
2. In the terminal, type the following command:

dotnet new classlib -o FlowLibrary -f net8.0

What is this?

This command will create a new class library project for you. The -o command specifies the project name and folder name, and the -f specifies the target framework version.

Target framework version

If you are familiar with class library projects, you may be puzzled as to why you need to specify net8.0 as the target framework version rather than a .NET Standard version like netstandard2.1. This is explained later in the docs (see Plugins), but for the moment, just know that this is both intentional and required.

3. Now navigate inside your new project folder:

cd FlowLibrary

Add NuGet packages

In order to create your Flows, you need Didact's NuGet packages. Specifically, you need to add one NuGet package called Didact Core.

Run the following command to add Didact Core as a NuGet package dependency in your new class library:

dotnet add package DidactCore