Build a Streaming Application Using Apache Kafka and .NET

This post details building a streaming application using Apache Kafka, the .NET producer and consumer clients, and the Task Parallel Library (TPL) Dataflow Library. It explains how to use `BufferBlock` and `TransformBlock` to create a pipeline for consuming, processing (including simulated CPU-intensive tasks), and producing data. The post highlights how TPL's Dataflow Library handles work partitioning, thread scheduling, and maintains data order even with increased parallelism, enabling higher throughput for CPU/IO-intensive tasks.