Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical orleans marinade. Distributed applications are defined as apps that span more than a single process, often beyond hardware boundaries using peer-to-peer communication. One of the primary design objectives of Orleans is to simplify the complexities of distributed application development by providing a common set of patterns and APIs.

For this reason, Orleans has often been referred to as “Distributed . NET” and is the framework of choice when building cloud-native apps. The “Actor Model” Orleans is based on the “actor model”. The actor model originated in the early 1970s and is now a core component of Orleans. The actor model is a programming model in which each actor is a lightweight, concurrent, immutable object that encapsulates a piece of state and corresponding behavior.

Actors communicate exclusively with each other using asynchronous messages. Actors are purely logical entities that always exist, virtually. Since actors always exist, they are always addressable. This is a novel approach to building a new generation of distributed applications for the Cloud era. The Orleans programming model tames the complexity inherent to highly parallel distributed applications without restricting capabilities or imposing constraints on the developer. For more information, see Orleans: Virtual Actors via Microsoft Research. A virtual actor is represented as an Orleans grain.

The grain is one of several Orleans primitives. In terms of the actor model, a grain is a virtual actor. The fundamental building block in any Orleans application is a grain. Grains are entities comprising user-defined identity, behavior, and state.