Book Image

Distributed .NET with Microsoft Orleans

By : Bhupesh Guptha Muthiyalu, Suneel Kumar Kunani
Book Image

Distributed .NET with Microsoft Orleans

By: Bhupesh Guptha Muthiyalu, Suneel Kumar Kunani

Overview of this book

Building distributed applications in this modern era can be a tedious task as customers expect high availability, high performance, and improved resilience. With the help of this book, you'll discover how you can harness the power of Microsoft Orleans to build impressive distributed applications. Distributed .NET with Microsoft Orleans will demonstrate how to leverage Orleans to build highly scalable distributed applications step by step in the least possible time and with minimum effort. You'll explore some of the key concepts of Microsoft Orleans, including the Orleans programming model, runtime, virtual actors, hosting, and deployment. As you advance, you'll become well-versed with important Orleans assets such as grains, silos, timers, and persistence. Throughout the book, you'll create a distributed application by adding key components to the application as you progress through each chapter and explore them in detail. By the end of this book, you'll have developed the confidence and skills required to build distributed applications using Microsoft Orleans and deploy them in Microsoft Azure.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1 - Distributed Applications Architecture
4
Section 2 - Working with Microsoft Orleans
10
Section 3 - Building Patterns in Orleans
13
Section 4 - Hosting and Deploying Orleans Applications to Azure

Understanding grain interface versioning

As the application grows over a period, there can be the addition of new actions to grains or changes to the existing implementations. To adhere to these changes, we normally version the functionality. In Orleans, versioning of grains is supported through grain interface versioning. To version a grain, we add the Version attribute to the grain interface as shown in the following snippet:

[Version(1)]
public interface IHotelGrain : IGrainWithStringKey

In the preceding code snippet, the version of IHotelGrain is 1. The default version of a grain interface is 0. That means the version of a grain without a version attribute is 0.

Grain activation with versions

The following flow chart depicts the activation of a versioned grain:

Figure 8.5 – Version grain activation flow

When there is a message to a versioned grain, the Orleans runtime first checks whether there is an existing activation. If there is...