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1.3.12 December 18 2018

Placeholder for nightlies

1.3.11 December 17 2018

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.3

Akka.NET v1.3.11 is a bugfix patch primarily aimed at solving the following issue: DotNetty Remote Transport Issues with .NET Core 2.1.

.NET Core 2.1 exposed some issues with the DotNetty connection methods in DotNetty v0.4.8 that have since been fixed in subsequent releases. In Akka.NET v1.3.11 we've resolved this issue by upgrading to DotNetty v0.6.0.

In addition to the above, we've introduced some additional fixes and changes in Akka.NET v1.3.11:

To see the full set of changes for Akka.NET 1.3.11, click here

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
5 123 71 Aaron Stannard
3 96 10 Ismael Hamed
2 4 3 Oleksandr Kobylianskyi
1 5 1 Ruben Mamo
1 23 6 Chris Hoare

1.3.10 November 1 2018

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.3

Akka.NET v1.3.10 consists mostly of bug fixes and patches to various parts of Akka.NET:

To see the full set of changes for Akka.NET 1.3.10, click here.

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
8 887 220 Bartosz Sypytkowski
5 67 174 Aaron Stannard
4 15 7 Caio Proiete
3 7 4 Maciek Misztal
2 60 8 Marcus Weaver
2 57 12 moerwald
2 278 16 Peter Shrosbree
2 2 2 Fábio Beirão
1 71 71 Sean Gilliam
1 6 0 basbossinkdivverence
1 24 5 Ismael Hamed
1 193 8 to11mtm
1 17 33 zbynek001
1 12 3 Oleksandr Bogomaz
1 1 1 MelnikovIG
1 1 1 Alex Villarreal
1 1 0 Yongjie Ma

1.3.9 August 22 2018

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.3

Akka.NET v1.3.9 features some major changes to Akka.Cluster.Sharding, additional Akka.Streams stages, and some general bug fixes across the board.

Akka.Cluster.Sharding Improvements The Akka.Cluster.Sharding documentation already describes some of the major changes in Akka.NET v1.3.9, but we figured it would be worth calling special attention to those changes here.

Props Factory for Entity Actors

In some cases, the actor may need to know the entityId associated with it. This can be achieved using the entityPropsFactory parameter to ClusterSharding.Start or ClusterSharding.StartAsync. The entity ID will be passed to the factory as a parameter, which can then be used in the creation of the actor.

In addition to the existing APIs we've always had for defining sharded entities via Props, Akka.NET v1.3.9 introduces a new method overload for Start and StartAsync which allows users to pass in the entityId of each entity actor as a constructor argument to those entities when they start.

For example:

var anotherCounterShard = ClusterSharding.Get(Sys).Start(
	                        typeName: "AnotherCounter",
	                        entityProps: Props.Create<AnotherCounter>(),
	                        typeName: AnotherCounter.ShardingTypeName,
	                        entityPropsFactory: entityId => AnotherCounter.Props(entityId),
	                        settings: ClusterShardingSettings.Create(Sys),
	                        extractEntityId: Counter.ExtractEntityId,
	                        extractShardId: Counter.ExtractShardId);

This will give you the opportunity to pass in the entityId for each actor as a constructor argument into the Props of your entity actor and possibly other use cases too.

Improvements to Starting and Querying Existing Shard Entity Types Two additional major usability improvements to Cluster.Sharding come from some API additions and changes.

The first is that it's now possible to look up all of the currently registered shard types via the ClusterSharding.ShardTypeNames property. So long as a ShardRegion of that type has been started in the cluster, that entity type name will be added to the collection exposed by this property.

The other major usability improvement is a change to the ClusterSharding.Start property itself. Historically, you used to have to know whether or not the node you wanted to use sharding on was going to be hosting shards (call ClusterSharding.Start) or simply communicated with shards hosted on a different cluster role type (call ClusterSharding.StartProxy). Going forward, it's safe to call ClusterSharding.Start on any node and you will either receive an IActorRef to active ShardRegion or a ShardRegion running in "proxy only" mode; this is determined by looking at the ClusterShardingSettings and determining if the current node is in a role that is allowed to host shards of this type.

Akka.Streams Additions and Changes In Akka.NET v1.3.9 we've added some new built-in stream stages and API methods designed to help improve developer productivity and ease of use.

Other Updates, Additions, and Bugfixes

To see the full set of changes for Akka.NET v1.3.9, click here.

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
28 2448 5691 Aaron Stannard
11 1373 230 zbynek001
8 4590 577 Bartosz Sypytkowski
4 438 99 Ismael Hamed
4 230 240 Sean Gilliam
2 1438 0 Oleksandr Bogomaz
1 86 79 Nick Polideropoulos
1 78 0 v1rusw0rm
1 4 4 Joshua Garnett
1 32 17 Jarl Sveinung Flø Rasmussen
1 27 1 Sam13
1 250 220 Maxim Cherednik
1 184 124 Josh Taylor
1 14 0 Peter Shrosbree
1 1278 42 Marc Piechura
1 1 1 Vasily Kirichenko
1 1 1 Samuel Kelemen
1 1 1 Nyola Mike
1 1 1 Fábio Beirão

1.3.8 June 04 2018

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.3

Akka.NET v1.3.8 is a minor patch consisting mostly of bug fixes as well as an upgrade to DotNetty v0.4.8.

DotNetty v0.4.8 Upgrade You can read the release notes for DotNetty v0.4.8 here - but here are the major improvements as they pertain to Akka.NET:

  1. DotNetty length-frame decoding is now fully-supported on .NET Core on Linux and
  2. Socket shutdown code has been improved, which fixes a potential "port exhaustion" issue reported by Akka.Remote users.

If you've been affected by either of these issues, we strongly encourage that you upgrade your applications to Akka.NET v1.3.8 as soon as possible.

Updates and Additions

  1. Akka.Streams: add PreMaterialize support for Sources
  2. Akka.Streams: add PreMaterialize support for Sinks
  3. Akka.Streams: Port Pulse, DelayFlow and Valve streams-contrib stages
  4. Akka.FSharp: Unit test Akka.FSharp.System.create with extensions

Relevant documentation for Akka.Streams pre-materialization, for those who are interested: http://getakka.net/articles/streams/basics.html#source-pre-materialization

Bugfixes

  1. Akka.Remote: ActorSelection fails for ActorPath from remotely deployed actors
  2. Akka.Remote: WilcardCard ActorSelections that fail to match any actors don't deliver messages into DeadLetters
  3. Akka.Cluster: SplitBrainResolver logs "network partition detected" after change in cluster membership, even when no unreachable nodes
  4. Akka: SynchronizationLockException in user-defined mailboxes
  5. Akka: UnhandledMessageForwarder crashes and restarted every time the app is starting
COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
17 498 171 Aaron Stannard
4 1054 23 Bartosz Sypytkowski
2 2 2 Fábio Beirão
2 16 2 Aaron Palmer
1 1063 4 Oleksandr Bogomaz
1 1 1 Ismael Hamed
1 1 1 Gauthier Segay

1.3.7 May 15 2018

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.3

Akka.NET v1.3.7 is a minor patch consisting mostly of bug fixes.

DotNetty stabilization We've had a number of issues related to DotNetty issues over recent weeks, and we've resolved those in this patch by doing the following:

We will be upgrading to DotNetty v0.4.8 in a near future release, but in the meantime this patch fixes critical issues introduced in v1.3.6.

Bugfixes

  1. Akka.Persistence.Sql: Slow reading of big snapshots - this will require a recompilation of all Akka.Persistence.Sql-type Akka.Persistence plugins.
  2. Akka.Fsharp: spawning an actor results in Exception in 1.3.6 release

See the full list of fixes for Akka.NET v1.3.7 here.

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
5 130 180 Aaron Stannard
3 7 1 chrisjhoare
2 3 1 ivog
1 70 17 TietoOliverKurowski
1 41 4 Bart de Boer
1 11 3 Oleksandr Bogomaz
1 1 1 Vasily Kirichenko

1.3.6 April 17 2018

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.3

Akka.NET v1.3.6 is a minor patch consisting mostly of bug fixes.

Akka.FSharp on .NET Standard The biggest change in this release is the availability of Akka.FSharp on .NET Standard and .NET Core!

Akka.FSharp runs on .NET Standard 2.0 as of 1.3.6 (it doesn't support .NET Standard 1.6 like the rest of Akka.NET due to FSharp-specific, downstream dependencies.)

Updates and Additions

  1. Akka.Streams: Port 4 "streams contrib" stages - AccumulateWhileUnchanged, LastElement, PartitionWith, Sample
  2. Akka.Remote: Add public-port setting to allow for port aliasing inside environments like Docker, PCF

Bugfixes

  1. Akka.Cluster.Sharding: Removing string.GetHashCode usage from distributed classes
  2. Akka.Cluster.Sharding: HashCodeMessageExtractor can create inconsistent ShardId's
  3. Akka.Remote: Error while decoding incoming Akka PDU Exception when communicating between Remote Actors with a large number of messages on Linux
  4. Akka.Cluster.Sharding: DData: Cannot create a shard proxy on a cluster node that is not in the same role as the proxied shard entity
  5. Akka.Streams: Fix GroupedWithin allocation of new buffer after emit.
  6. Akka.Persistence: Add missing ReturnRecoveryPermit

You can see the full set of changes for Akka.NET v1.3.6 here.

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
7 261 38 Aaron Stannard
6 28 28 cimryan
5 53 20 Tomasz Jaskula
2 7 4 Ondrej Pialek
2 20 10 Ismael Hamed
1 739 0 Oleksandr Bogomaz
1 64 6 Robert
1 23 29 nathvi
1 2 1 Sebastien Bacquet
1 1 2 Ond�ej Piálek
1 1 1 Steffen Skov
1 1 1 Sean Gilliam
1 1 1 Matthew Herman
1 1 1 Jan Pluskal

1.3.5 February 21 2018

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.3

Akka.NET v1.3.5 is a minor patch containing only bugfixes.

Updates and Bugfixes

  1. Akka.Cluster.Tools: DistributedPubSub Fix premature pruning of topics

You can see the full set of changes for Akka.NET v1.3.4 here.

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
4 4405 4284 Aaron Stannard
1 4 4 Joshua Garnett

1.3.4 February 1 2018

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.3

Akka.NET v1.3.4 is a minor patch mostly focused on bugfixes.

Updates and Bugfixes

  1. Akka: Ask interface should be clean
  2. Akka.Cluster.Sharding: DData replicator is always assigned
  3. Akka.Cluster: Akka.Cluster Group Routers don't respect role setting when running with allow-local-routees
  4. Akka.Streams: Implement PartitionHub
  5. Akka.Remote AkkaPduCodec performance fixes
  6. Akka.Serialization.Hyperion updated to Hyperion v0.9.8

You can see the full set of changes for Akka.NET v1.3.4 here.

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
6 304 209 Aaron Stannard
1 250 220 Maxim Cherednik
1 1278 42 Marc Piechura
1 1 1 zbynek001
1 1 1 Vasily Kirichenko

1.3.3 January 19 2018

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.3

The largest changes featured in Akka.NET v1.3.3 are the introduction of Splint brain resolvers and WeaklyUp members in Akka.Cluster.

Akka.Cluster Split Brain Resolvers Split brain resolvers are specialized IDowningProvider implementations that give Akka.Cluster users the ability to automatically down Unreachable cluster nodes in accordance with well-defined partition resolution strategies, namely:

  • Static quorums;
  • Keep majority;
  • Keep oldest; and
  • Keep-referee.

You can learn more about why you may want to use these and which strategy is right for you by reading our Splint brain resolver documentation.

Akka.Cluster WeaklyUp Members One common problem that occurs in Akka.Cluster is that once a current member of the cluster becomes Unreachable, the leader of the cluster isn't able to allow any new members of the cluster to join until that Unreachable member becomes Reachable again or is removed from the cluster via a Cluster.Down command.

Beginning in Akka.NET 1.3.3, you can allow nodes to still join and participate in the cluster even while other member nodes are unreachable by opting into the WeaklyUp status for members. You can do this by setting the following in your HOCON configuration beginning in Akka.NET v1.3.3:

akka.cluster.allow-weakly-up-members = on

This will allow nodes who have joined the cluster when at least one other member was unreachable to become functioning cluster members with a status of WeaklyUp. If the unreachable members of the cluster are downed or become reachable again, all WeaklyUp nodes will be upgraded to the usual Up status for available cluster members.

Akka.Cluster.Sharding and Akka.Cluster.DistributedData Integration A new experimental feature we've added in Akka.NET v1.3.3 is the ability to fully decouple Akka.Cluster.Sharding from Akka.Persistence and instead run it on top of Akka.Cluster.DistributedData, our library for creating eventually consistent replicated data structures on top of Akka.Cluster.

Beginning in Akka.NET 1.3.3, you can set the following HOCON configuration option to have the ShardingCoordinator replicate its shard placement state using DData instead of persisting it to storage via Akka.Persistence:

akka.cluster.sharding.state-store-mode = ddata

This setting only affects how Akka.Cluster.Sharding's internal state is managed. If you're using Akka.Persistence with your own entity actors inside Akka.Cluster.Sharding, this change will have no impact on them.

Updates and bugfixes:

You can see the full changeset for Akka.NET 1.3.3 here.

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
17 2094 1389 Marc Piechura
13 5426 2827 Bartosz Sypytkowski
12 444 815 Aaron Stannard
11 346 217 ravengerUA
3 90 28 zbynek001
3 78 84 Maxim Cherednik
2 445 1 Vasily Kirichenko
2 22 11 Ismael Hamed
2 11 9 Nicola Sanitate
1 9 10 mrrd
1 7 2 Richard Dobson
1 33 7 Ivars Auzins
1 30 11 Will
1 3 3 HaniOB
1 11 199 Jon Galloway
1 1 1 Sam Neirinck
1 1 1 Irvin Dominin

1.3.2 October 20 2017

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.3

Updates and bugfixes:

  • Bugfix: Akka incorrectly schedules continuations after .Ask, causing deadlocks and/or delays
  • Bugfix: ByteString.ToString is sometimes broken for Unicode encoding
  • Bugfix: ClusterShardingMessageSerializer Exception after upgrade from 1.2.0 to 1.3.1
  • Bugfix: Fix an inconstant ToString on ConsistentRoutee when the node is remote vs. local
  • Various documentation fixes
  • Akka.Streams: Implement MergePrioritized
  • Akka.Streams: Implement Restart Flow/Source/Sink
  • Akka.TestKit.Xunit: updated xunit dependency to 2.3.0 stable.
  • Akka.Cluster.TestKit: removed dependency on Akka.Tests.Shared.Internals
COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
9 137 59 Aaron Stannard
8 2713 997 Alex Valuyskiy
3 486 95 Bartosz Sypytkowski
3 12 12 Sebastien Bacquet
2 33 7 ravengerUA
2 184 102 Arjen Smits
1 71 7 Adam Friedman
1 7 4 Sam Neirinck
1 604 481 zbynek001
1 6 6 Kenneth Ito
1 42 3 Lukas Rieger
1 40 2 Joshua Benjamin
1 4 5 derrickcrowne
1 3 2 Mikhail Moussikhine
1 20 0 Arturo Sevilla
1 2 0 Paweł Bańka
1 17 11 planerist
1 1 4 lesscode

You can view the full v1.3.2 change set here.

1.3.1 September 5 2017

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.3

Updates and bugfixes:

  • Bugfix: Hyperion NuGet package restore creating duplicate assemblies for the same version inside Akka
  • Various documentation fixes and updates
  • Bugfix: issue where data sent via UDP when ByteString payload had buffers with length more than 1, UdpSender only wrote the first part of the buffers and dropped the rest.
  • Bugfix: Akka.IO.Tcp failed to write some outgoing messages.
  • Improved support for OSX & Rider
  • Bugfix: Akka.Persistence support for SerializerWithStringManifest required by Akka.Cluster.Sharding and Akka.Cluster.Tools
    • Akka.Persistence.Sqlite and Akka.Persistence.SqlServer were unable to support SerializerWithStringManifest, so using Akka.Cluster.Sharding with Sql plugins would not work.
  • Bugfix: Akka.Streams generic type parameters of the flow returned from current implementation of Bidiflow's JoinMat method were incorrect.
  • Bugfix: PersistenceMessageSerializer was failing with the wrong exception when a non-supported type was provided.

Akka.Persistence backwards compability warning:

  • Akka.Persistence.Sql introduces an additional field to the schema used by Sql-based plugins to allow for the use of SerializerWithStringManifest called serializer_id. It requires any previous Sql schema to be updated to have this field. Details are included in the Akka.Persistence.Sqlite plugin README.md file. Users of the Akka.Persistence.Sqlite plugin must alter their existing databases to add the field serializer_id int (4):
ALTER TABLE {your_event_journal_table_name} ADD COLUMN `serializer_id` INTEGER ( 4 )
ALTER TABLE {your_snapshot_table_name} ADD COLUMN `serializer_id` INTEGER ( 4 )

See the full set of Akka.NET 1.3.1 fixes here.

1.3.0 August 11 2017

Feature Release for Akka.NET Akka.NET 1.3.0 is a major feature release that introduces the significant changes to Akka.NET and its runtime.

.NET Core and .NET Standard 1.6 Support This release introduces support for .NET Standard 1.6 for our core libraries and .NET Core 1.1 for the MultiNode Test Runner standalone executable. All packages for Akka.NET are dual-released under both .NET 4.5 and .NET Standard 1.6.

As a side note: Akka.NET on .NET 4.5 is not wire compatible with Akka.NET on .NET Core; this is due to fundamental changes made to the base types in the CLR on .NET Core. It's a common problem facing many different serializers and networking libraries in .NET at the moment. You can use a X-plat serializer we've developed here: akkadotnet#2947 - please comment on that thread if you're considering building hybrid .NET and .NET Core clusters.

Akka.Persistence Released to Market Akka.Persistence has graduated from beta status to stable modules and its interfaces are now considered to be stable. We'll begin updating all of the Akka.Persistence plugins to stable and to add .NET Standard / .NET 4.5 support to each of them as well following this patch.

DocFx-based Documentation Site Documentation is now generated using DocFx and compiled from within the Akka.NET project rather than a separate documentation repository.

API Changes This release does not maintain wire format compatibility with the previous release (v1.2.3) inside Akka.Remote; primarily this is due to having to upgrade from Google Protobuf2 to Protobuf3 in order to add .NET Standard support, but we've also taken the liberty of making other serialization improvements while we're at it. So be advised that during an upgrade from 1.2.* to 1.3.* there will be periods of network disruption between nodes using different versions of the service.

Akka.Remote Performance Improvements Akka.Remote's throughput has been significantly increased.

See the full set of Akka.NET 1.3.0 fixes here.

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
64 7109 2670 Marc Piechura
61 2420 6703 Nick Chamberlain
46 2316 10066 Aaron Stannard
42 56428 85473 Alex Valuyskiy
32 7924 9483 ravengerUA
31 17284 13592 Bartosz Sypytkowski
25 2527 1124 Gregorius Soedharmo
21 7810 1688 zbynek001
11 1932 2167 Sean Gilliam
9 946 219 Arjen Smits
4 679 105 alexvaluyskiy
4 344 6 Lealand Vettleson
4 1644 2210 Arkatufus
3 32 6 Lukas Rieger
3 153 17 Quartus Dev
2 8 11 Paweł Bańka
2 4866 12678 olegz
2 1148 176 Ismael Hamed
1 62 5 Mikhail Kantarovskiy
1 4 2 tstojecki
1 22 2 Maxim Cherednik
1 1 1 Sean Killeen

1.2.3 July 07 2017

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.2

Resolves a bug introduced in Akka.NET 1.2.2 that caused Akka.Remote to not terminate properly under some conditions during ActorSystem.Terminate.

See the full set of Akka.NET 1.2.3 fixes here.

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
3 46 63 Aaron Stannard

1.2.2 June 28 2017

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.2

Finally, fully resolves issues related to Akka.Cluster nodes not being able to cleanly leave or join a cluster after a period of network instability. Also includes some minor fixes for clustered routers and Akka.Persistence.

See the full set of Akka.NET 1.2.2 fixes here.

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
13 589 52 Aaron Stannard

1.2.1 June 22 2017

Maintenance Release for Akka.NET 1.2

Resolves issues related to Akka.Cluster nodes not being able to cleanly leave or join a cluster after a period of network instability.

See the full set of Akka.NET 1.2.1 fixes here.

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
15 1362 753 alexvaluyskiy
7 635 1487 ravengerUA
7 1966 764 Nick Chamberlain
4 420 345 Aaron Stannard
3 18715 999 Alex Valuyskiy
2 1943 3492 Sean Gilliam
2 104 24 Jaskula Tomasz
1 6 10 Szer
1 20 25 Lealand Vettleson

1.2.0 April 11 2017

Feature Release for Akka.NET Akka.NET 1.2 is a major feature release that introduces the following major changes:

Akka.Remote now uses DotNetty for its transport layer The biggest change for 1.2 is the removal of Helios 2.0 as the default transport and the introduction of DotNetty. The new DotNetty transport is fully backwards compatible with the Helios 1.4 and 2.* transports, so you should be able to upgrade from any Akka.NET 1.* application to 1.2 without any downtime. All of the helios.tcp HOCON is also supported by the DotNetty transport, so none of that needs to updated for the DotNetty transport to work out of the box.

In addition, the DotNetty transport supports TLS, which can be enabled via the following HOCON:

akka {
  loglevel = DEBUG
  actor {
    provider = Akka.Remote.RemoteActorRefProvider,Akka.Remote
  }
  remote {
    dot-netty.tcp {
      port = 0
      hostname = 127.0.0.1
      enable-ssl = true
      log-transport = true
      ssl {
        suppress-validation = true
        certificate {
          # valid ssl certificate must be installed on both hosts
          path = "<valid certificate path>" 
          password = "<certificate password>"
          # flags is optional: defaults to "default-flag-set" key storage flag
          # other available storage flags:
          #   exportable | machine-key-set | persist-key-set | user-key-set | user-protected
          flags = [ "default-flag-set" ] 
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

You can read more about Akka.Remote's TLS support here.

See the complete DotNetty transport HOCON here.

Akka.Streams and Akka.Cluster.Tools RTMed Akka.Streams and Akka.Cluster.Tools have graduated from beta status to stable modules and their interfaces are now considered to be stable.

CoordinatedShutdown One of the major improvements in Akka.NET 1.2 is the addition of the new CoordinatedShutdown plugin, which is designed to make it easier for nodes that are running Akka.Cluster to automatically exit a cluster gracefully whenever ActorSystem.Terminate is called or when the process the node is running in attempts to exit. CoordinatedShutdown is fully extensible and can be used to schedule custom shutdown operations as part of ActorSystem termination.

You can read more about how to use CoordinatedShutdown here.

Additional Changes In addition to the above changes, there have been a large number of performance improvements, bug fixes, and documentation improvements made to Akka.NET in 1.2. Read the full list of changes in Akka.NET 1.2 here.

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
17 4840 4460 Alex Valuyskiy
16 4046 1144 Aaron Stannard
12 8591 2984 Sean Gilliam
6 971 1300 Sergey
5 6787 2073 Bartosz Sypytkowski
4 6461 8403 Arjen Smits
4 333 125 ravengerUA
3 71 65 Marc Piechura
3 300 24 Nick Chamberlain
2 79 40 Maxim Salamatko
2 305 20 Ismael Hamed
1 136 12 Sergey Kostrukov
1 1015 45 Lukas Rieger
1 1 0 siudeks

1.1.3 January 22 2017

Maintenance release for Akka.NET v1.1

Akka.NET v1.1.3 features some new libraries and an enormous number of bug fixes.

Akka.DistributedData Beta First, we've introduced an alpha of a new module intended for use with Akka.Cluster: Akka.DistributedData. The goal of this library is to make it possible to concurrently read and write replicated copies of the same entity across different nodes in the cluster using conflict-free replicated data types, often referred to as "CRDTs." These replicas can eventually be merged together in a fully consistent manner and are excellent choices for applications that require a high level of availability and partition tolerance.

The library is still a bit of a work in progress at the moment, but you are free to use it via the following command:

PS> Install-Package Akka.DistributedData -pre

Akka.Serialization.Wire Deprecated; Replaced with Akka.Serialization.Hyperion Wire recently changed its license to GPLv3, which is a poor fit for a technology like Akka.NET. Therefore, our default serializer beginning in Akka.NET 1.5 will be Hyperion instead. You can see how to set it up here: http://getakka.net/docs/Serialization#how-to-setup-hyperion-as-default-serializer

Other bug fixes, performance improvements, and changes You can see the full list of changes in Akka.NET 1.1.3 here.

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
19 878 228 Aaron Stannard
10 41654 3428 Sean Gilliam
5 11983 4543 Marc Piechura
4 37 33 Arjen Smits
4 12742 300 Bartosz Sypytkowski
3 144 74 Max
2 99 8 ZigMeowNyan
2 7 7 zbynek001
2 4 2 Andrey Leskov
2 225 767 Alex Valuyskiy
2 212 8 Gordey Doronin
1 8 499 Sean Farrow
1 5 5 tomanekt
1 4 2 Andrew Young
1 3 2 boriskreminskimoldev
1 28 3 Roman Eisendle
1 24 36 Maxim Salamatko
1 2 2 Jeff
1 190 38 Sergey
1 15 9 voltcode
1 12 2 Alexander Pantyukhin
1 107 0 Mikhail Kantarovskiy
1 101 0 derrickcrowne

1.1.2 September 21 2016

Maintenance release for Akka.NET v1.1

Akka.NET 1.1.2 introduces some exciting developments for Akka.NET users.

Mono Support and Improved IPV4/6 Configuration First, Akka.NET 1.1.2 is the first release of Akka.NET to be production-certified for Mono. We've made some changes to Akka.Remote, in particular, to design it to work within some of the confines of Mono 4.4.2. For instance, we now support the following HOCON configuration value for the default Helios TCP transport:

 helios.tcp {
	  # Omitted for brevity
      transport-protocol = tcp

      port = 2552

      hostname = ""

	  public-hostname = ""

	  dns-use-ipv6 = false
	  enforce-ip-family = false
}

helios.tcp.enforce-ip-family is a new setting added to the helios.tcp transport designed to allow Akka.Remote to function in environments that don't support IPV6. This includes Mono 4.4.2, Windows Azure WebApps, and possibly others. When this setting is turned on and dns-use-ipv6 = false, all sockets will be forced to use IPV4 only instead of dual mode. If this setting is turned on and dns-use-ipv6 = true, all sockets opened by the Helios transport will be forced to use IPV6 instead of dual-mode.

Currently, as of Mono 4.4.2, this setting is turned on by default. Mono 4.6, when it's released, will allow dual-mode to work consistently again in the future.

We run the entire Akka.NET test suite on Mono and all modules pass.

Akka.Cluster Downing Providers We've added a new feature to Akka.Cluster known as a "downing provider" - this is a pluggable strategy that you can configure via HOCON to specify how nodes in your Akka.NET cluster may automatically mark unreachable nodes as down.

Out of the box Akka.Cluster only provides the default "auto-down" strategy that's been included as part of Akka.Cluster in the past. However, you can now subclass the Akka.Cluster.IDowningProvider interface to implement your own strategies, which you can then load through HOCON:

# i.e.: akka.cluster.downing-provider-class = "Akka.Cluster.Tests.FailingDowningProvider, Akka.Cluster.Tests"
akka.cluster.downing-provider-class = "Fully-qualified-type-name, Assembly"

Other Fixes We've also made significant improvements to the Akka.NET scheduler, more than doubling its performance and an significantly decreasing its memory allocation and garbage collection; updated Akka.Streams; fixed bugs in Akka.Cluster routers; and more. You can read the full list of changes in 1.1.2 here.

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
16 3913 1440 ravengerUA
9 2323 467 Aaron Stannard
9 12568 2865 Marc Piechura
4 12 5 Michael Kantarovsky
3 381 196 Bartosz Sypytkowski
2 99 0 rogeralsing
2 359 17 Chris Constantin
2 29 6 Denys Zhuravel
2 11 11 Ismael Hamed
1 74 25 mrrd
1 5 2 Szymon Kulec
1 48 65 alexpantyukhin
1 3 2 Tamas Vajk
1 2 0 Julien Adam
1 121 26 andrey.leskov
1 1020 458 Sean Gilliam
1 1 1 Maciej Misztal

1.1.1 July 15 2016

Maintenance release for Akka.NET v1.1

Akka.NET 1.1.1 addresses a number of bugs and issues reported by end users who made the upgrade from Akka.NET 1.0.* to Akka.NET 1.1.

DNS improvements The biggest set of fixes included in Akka.NET 1.1.1 deal with how the Helios transport treats IPV6 addresses and performs DNS resolution. In Akka.NET 1.0.* Helios only supported IPV4 addresses and would use that as the default for DNS. In Akka.NET 1.1 we upgraded to using Helios 2.1, which supports both IPV6 and IPV4, but changed the default DNS resolution strategy to use IPV6. This caused some breakages for users who were using the public-hostname setting inside Helios in combination with a hostname value that used an IPV4 address.

This is now fixed - Akka.NET 1.1.1 uses Helios 2.1.2 which defaults back to an IPV4 DNS resolution strategy for both inbound and outbound connections. We've also fixed the way we encode and format IPV6 addresses into ActorPath and Address string representations (although we still have an issue with parsing IPV6 from HOCON.)

If you need to use IPV6 for DNS resolution, you can enable it by changing the following setting:

akka.remote.helios.tcp.dns-use-ipv6 = true

You can see the full list of Akka.NET 1.1.1 changes here.

1.1.0 July 05 2016

Feature Release for Akka.NET

In Akka.NET 1.1 we introduce the following major changes:

  • Akka.Cluster is no longer in beta; it is released as a fully stable module with a frozen API that is ready for production use.
  • Akka.Remote now has a new Helios 2.1 transport that is up to 5x faster than the previous implementation and with tremendously lower memory consumption.
  • The actor mailbox system has been replaced with the MailboxType system, which standardizes all mailbox implementations on a common core and instead allows for pluggable IMessageQueue implementations. This will make it easier to develop user-defined mailboxes and also has the added benefit of reducing all actor memory footprints by 34%.
  • The entire router system has been updated, including support for new "controller" actors that can be used to adjust a router's routing table in accordance to external events (i.e. a router that adjusts whom it routes to based on CPU utilization, which will be implemented in Akka.Cluster.Metrics).

Full list of Akka.NET 1.1 fixes and changes

API Changes There have been a couple of important API changes which will affect end-users upgrading from Akka.NET versions 1.0.*.

First breaking change deals with the PriorityMailbox base class, used by developers who need to prioritize specific message types ahead of others.

All user-defined instances of this type must now include the following constructor in order to work (using an example from Akka.NET itself:)

public class IntPriorityMailbox : UnboundedPriorityMailbox
{
    protected override int PriorityGenerator(object message)
    {
        return message as int? ?? Int32.MaxValue;
    }

    public IntPriorityMailbox(Settings settings, Config config) : base(settings, config)
    {
    }
}

There must be a MyMailboxType(Settings settings, Config config) constructor on all custom mailbox types going forward, or a ConfigurationException will be thrown when trying to instantiate an actor who uses the mailbox type.

Second breaking change deals with Akka.Cluster itself. In the past you could access all manner of data from the ClusterReadView class (accessed via the Cluster.ReadView property) - such as the addresses of all other members, who the current leader was, and so forth.

Going forward ClusterReadView is now marked as internal, but if you need access to any of this data you can access the Cluster.State property, which will return a CurrentClusterState object. This contains most of the same information that was previously available on ClusterReadView.

Akka.Streams Another major part of Akka.NET 1.1 is the introduction of Akka.Streams, a powerful library with a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that allows you to compose Akka.NET actors and workflows into streams of events and messages.

As of 1.1 Akka.Streams is now available as a beta module on NuGet.

We highly recommend that you read the Akka.Streams Quick Start Guide for Akka.NET as a place to get started.

Akka.Persistence.Query A second beta module is also now available as part of Akka.NET 1.1, Akka.Persistence.Query - this module is built on top of Akka.Streams and Akka.Persistence and allows users to query ranges of information directly from their underlying Akka.Persistence stores for more powerful types of reads, aggregations, and more.

Akka.Persistence.Query is available for all SQL implementations of Akka.Persistence and will be added to our other Akka.Persistence plugins shortly thereafter.

Thank you! Thanks for all of your patience and support as we worked to deliver this to you - it's been a tremendous amount of work but we really appreciate the help of all of the bug reports, Gitter questions, StackOverflow questions, and testing that our users have done on Akka.NET and specifically, Akka.Cluster over the past two years. We couldn't have done this without you.

23 contributors since release v1.0.8

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
133 38124 7835 Silv3rcircl3
112 25826 10493 Chris Constantin
70 45449 11556 Bartosz Sypytkowski
44 22804 13971 ravengerUA
40 9811 6396 Aaron Stannard
12 9539 6619 Marc Piechura
6 1692 959 Sean Gilliam
4 448 0 alexpantyukhin
3 772 4 maxim.salamatko
3 3 382 Danthar
2 40 46 Vagif Abilov
1 91 103 rogeralsing
1 3 3 Jeff Cyr
1 219 44 Michael Kantarovsky
1 2 1 Juergen Hoetzel
1 19 8 tstojecki
1 187 2 Bart de Boer
1 178 0 Willem Meints
1 17 1 Kamil Wojciechowski
1 120 7 JeffCyr
1 11 7 corneliutusnea
1 1 1 Tamas Vajk
1 0 64 annymsMthd

1.0.8 April 26 2016

Maintenance release for Akka.NET v1.0.7

Fixes an issue with the 1.0.7 release where the default settings for Akka.Persistence changed and caused potential breaking changes for Akka.Persistence users. Those changes have been reverted back to the same values as previous versions.

General fixes:

Commit Stats for v1.0.8

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
4 240 59 Aaron Stannard
3 268 1 Danthar
3 189 2810 Silv3rcircl3
2 204 4 Willem Meints
2 161 108 Bartosz Sypytkowski
2 101 24 Sean Gilliam
1 25 16 zbynek001

1.0.7 April 4 2016

Maintenance release for Akka.NET v1.0.6 The biggest changes in Akka.NET 1.0.7 have been made to Akka.Persistence, which is now designed to match the final stable release version in JVM Akka 2.4. Akka.Persistence is on-target to exit beta and become a fully mature module as of Akka.NET 1.5, due in May/June timeframe.

A quick note about 1.5 - JSON.NET will be replaced by Wire as the default serializer going forward, so if you want to be forward-compatible with 1.5 you will need to switch to using Wire today. Learn how to switch to using Wire as the default Akka.NET serializer.

If you install 1.0.7 you may see the following warning appear:

NewtonSoftJsonSerializer has been detected as a default serializer. It will be obsoleted in Akka.NET starting from version 1.5 in the favor of Wire for more info visit: http://getakka.net/docs/Serialization#how-to-setup-wire-as-default-serializer If you want to suppress this message set HOCON {configPath} config flag to on.

This release also fixes some issues with the Cluster.Tools and Cluster.Sharding NuGet packages, which weren't versioned correctly in previous releases.

Fixes & Changes - Akka.NET Core

Fixes & Changes - Akka.Remote, Akka.Cluster, Et al

Fixes & Changes - Akka.Persistence

Commit Stats for v1.0.7

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
12 1718 2213 Aaron Stannard
11 2187 2167 Silv3rcircl3
7 433 75 JeffCyr
6 2 1127 Danthar
6 10383 3054 Chris Constantin
3 510 25 maxim.salamatko
3 5 3 Christopher Martin
2 53 65 rogeralsing
2 50 1 mukulsinghsaini
2 2738 2035 Sean Gilliam
2 25 4 Bartosz Sypytkowski
2 2 2 utcnow
2 14 13 zbynek001
2 130 126 annymsMthd
1 58 0 Denis Kostikov
1 48 43 voltcode
1 213 66 Alex Koshelev
1 2 2 Tamas Vajk
1 2 2 Marc Piechura
1 2 1 Juergen Hoetzel
1 19 8 tstojecki
1 13 13 Willie Ferguson
1 1 1 ravengerUA

1.0.6 January 18 2016

Maintenance release for Akka.NET v1.0.5 This patch consists of many bug fixes, performance improvements, as well as the addition of two brand new alpha modules for Akka.Cluster users.

Akka.Cluster.Tools and Akka.Cluster.Sharding The biggest part of this release is the addition of Akka.Cluster.Tools and Akka.Cluster.Sharding, both of which are available now as pre-release packages on NuGet.

PM> Install-Package Akka.Cluster.Tools -pre

and

PM> Install-Package Akka.Cluster.Sharding -pre

Respectively, these two packages extend Akka.Cluster to do the following:

  1. Distributed pub/sub (Akka.Cluster.Tools)
  2. ClusterClient - subscribe to changes in cluster availability without actually being part of the cluster itself. (Akka.Cluster.Tools)
  3. ClusterSingleton - guarantee a single instance of a specific actor throughout the cluster. (Akka.Cluster.Tools)
  4. Sharding - partition data into durable stores (built on top of Akka.Persistence) in a manner that is fault-tolerant and recoverable across thecluster. (Akka.Cluster.Sharding)

Check out the documentation for more details!

Fixes & Changes - Akka.NET Core

Fixes & Changes - Akka.Remote & Akka.Cluster It should be noted that we've improved the throughput from Akka.NET v1.0.5 to 1.0.6 by a factor of 8

Fixes & Changes - Akka.Persistence

A special thanks to all of our contributors for making this happen! 18 contributors since release v1.0.5

COMMITS LOC+ LOC- AUTHOR
22 3564 28087 Aaron Stannard
15 1710 1303 rogeralsing
6 569 95 Silv3rcircl3
6 53594 4417 Bartosz Sypytkowski
5 1786 345 Sean Gilliam
3 786 159 maxim.salamatko
2 765 277 JeffCyr
2 44 53 Chris Constantin
2 14 2 Simon Anderson
1 84 4 Bart de Boer
1 6051 27 danielmarbach
1 6 2 tstojecki
1 3 5 Ralf1108
1 27 0 Andrew Skotzko
1 2 2 easuter
1 2 1 Danthar
1 182 0 derwasp
1 179 0 Onat Yiğit Mercan

1.0.5 December 3 2015

Maintenance release for Akka.NET v1.0.4 This release is a collection of bug fixes, performance enhancements, and general improvements contributed by 29 individual contributors.

Fixes & Changes - Akka.NET Core

Fixes & Changes - Akka.Remote, Akka.Cluster

Fixes & Changes - Akka.Persistence

A special thanks to all of our contributors, organized below by the number of changes made:

23369 5258 18111 Aaron Stannard 18827 16329 2498 Bartosz Sypytkowski 11994 9496 2498 Steffen Forkmann 6031 4637 1394 maxim.salamatko 1987 1667 320 Graeme Bradbury 1556 1149 407 Sean Gilliam 1118 1118 0 moliver 706 370 336 rogeralsing 616 576 40 Marek Kadek 501 5 496 Alex Koshelev 377 269 108 Jeff Cyr 280 208 72 willieferguson 150 98 52 Christian Palmstierna 85 63 22 Willie Ferguson 77 71 6 Emil Ingerslev 66 61 5 Grover Jackson 60 39 21 Alexander Pantyukhin 56 33 23 Uladzimir Makarau 55 54 1 rdavisau 51 18 33 alex-kondrashov 42 26 16 Silv3rcircl3 36 30 6 evertmulder 33 19 14 Filip Malachowicz 13 11 2 Suhas Chatekar 7 6 1 tintoy 4 2 2 Jonathan 2 1 1 neekgreen 2 1 1 Christopher Martin 2 1 1 Artem Borzilov

1.0.4 August 07 2015

Maintenance release for Akka.NET v1.0.3

Akka.IO This release introduces some major new features to Akka.NET, including Akka.IO - a new set of capabilities built directly into the Akka NuGet package that allow you to communicate with your actors directly via TCP and UDP sockets from external (non-actor) systems.

If you want to see a really cool example of Akka.IO in action, look at this sample that shows off how to use the Telnet commandline to interact directly with Akka.NET actors.

Akka.Persistence.MongoDb and Akka.Persistence.Sqlite Two new flavors of Akka.Persistence support are now available. You can install them via the commandline!

PM> Install-Package Akka.Persistence.MongoDb -pre

and

PM> Install-Package Akka.Persistence.Sqlite -pre

Fixes & Changes - Akka.NET Core

Akka.DI.StructureMap We now have support for the StructureMap dependency injection framework out of the box. You can install it here!

PM> Install-Package Akka.DI.StructureMap

1.0.3 June 12 2015

Bugfix release for Akka.NET v1.0.2.

This release addresses an issue with Akka.Persistence.SqlServer and Akka.Persistence.PostgreSql where both packages were missing a reference to Akka.Persistence.Sql.Common.

In Akka.NET v1.0.3 we've packaged Akka.Persistence.Sql.Common into its own NuGet package and referenced it in the affected packages.

1.0.2 June 2 2015

Bugfix release for Akka.NET v1.0.1.

Fixes & Changes - Akka.NET Core

Fixes & Changes - Akka.NET Dependency Injection

Fixes & Changes - Akka.Remote and Akka.Cluster

Fixes & Changes - Akka.Persistence

New Features:

Akka.TestKit.XUnit2 Akka.NET now has support for XUnit 2.0! You can install Akka.TestKit.XUnit2 via the NuGet commandline:

PM> Install-Package Akka.TestKit.XUnit2

Akka.Persistence.PostgreSql and Akka.Persistence.Cassandra Akka.Persistence now has two additional concrete implementations for PostgreSQL and Cassandra! You can install either of the packages using the following commandline:

Akka.Persistence.PostgreSql Configuration Docs

PM> Install-Package Akka.Persistence.PostgreSql

Akka.Persistence.Cassandra Configuration Docs

PM> Install-Package Akka.Persistence.Cassandra

Akka.DI.StructureMap Akka.NET's dependency injection system now supports StructureMap! You can install Akka.DI.StructureMap via the NuGet commandline:

PM> Install-Package Akka.DI.StructureMap

1.0.1 Apr 28 2015

Bugfix release for Akka.NET v1.0.

Fixes:

New Features:

Akka.TestKit.NUnit Akka.NET now has support for NUnit inside its TestKit. You can install Akka.TestKit.NUnit via the NuGet commandline:

PM> Install-Package Akka.TestKit.NUnit

Akka.Persistence.SqlServer The first full implementation of Akka.Persistence is now available for SQL Server.

Read the full instructions for working with Akka.Persistence.SQLServer here.

1.0.0 Apr 09 2015

Akka.NET is officially no longer in beta status. The APIs introduced in Akka.NET v1.0 will enjoy long-term support from the Akka.NET development team and all of its professional support partners.

Many breaking changes were introduced between v0.8 and v1.0 in order to provide better future extensibility and flexibility for Akka.NET, and we will outline the major changes in detail in these release notes.

However, if you want full API documentation we recommend going to the following:

Updated Packages with 1.0 Stable Release

All of the following NuGet packages have been upgraded to 1.0 for stable release:

  • Akka.NET Core
  • Akka.FSharp
  • Akka.Remote
  • Akka.TestKit
  • Akka.DI (dependency injection)
  • Akka.Loggers (logging)

The following packages (and modules dependent on them) are still in pre-release status:

  • Akka.Cluster
  • Akka.Persistence

Introducing Full Mono Support for Akka.NET

One of the biggest changes in Akka.NET v1.0 is the introduction of full Mono support across all modules; we even have Raspberry PI machines talking to laptops over Akka.Remote!

We've tested everything using Mono v3.12.1 across OS X and Ubuntu.

Please let us know how well Akka.NET + Mono runs on your environment!

API Changes in v1.0

All methods returning an ActorRef now return IActorRef This is the most significant breaking change introduced in AKka.NET v1.0. Rather than returning the ActorRef abstract base class from all of the ActorOf, Sender and other methods we now return an instance of the IActorRef interface instead.

This was done in order to guarantee greater future extensibility without additional breaking changes, so we decided to pay off that technical debt now that we're supporting these APIs long-term.

Here's the set of breaking changes you need to be aware of:

  • Renamed:
    • ActorRef --> IActorRef
    • ActorRef.Nobody --> ActorRefs.Nobody
    • ActorRef.NoSender --> ActorRefs.NoSender
  • ActorRef's operators == and != has been removed. This means all expressions like actorRef1 == actorRef2 must be replaced with Equals(actorRef1, actorRef2)
  • Tell(object message), i.e. the implicit sender overload, has been moved to an extension method, and requires using Akka.Actor; to be accessible.
  • Implicit cast from ActorRef to Routee has been replaced with Routee.FromActorRef(actorRef)

async / await Support

ReceiveActors now support Async/Await out of the box.

public class MyActor : ReceiveActor
{
       public MyActor()
       {
             Receive<SomeMessage>(async some => {
                    //we can now safely use await inside this receive handler
                    await SomeAsyncIO(some.Data);
                    Sender.Tell(new EverythingIsAllOK());                   
             });
       }
}

It is also possible to specify the behavior for the async handler, using AsyncBehavior.Suspend and AsyncBehavior.Reentrant as the first argument. When using Suspend the normal actor semantics will be preserved, the actor will not be able to process any new messages until the current async operation is completed. While using Reentrant will allow the actor to multiplex messages during the await period. This does not mean that messages are processed in parallel, we still stay true to "one message at a time", but each await continuation will be piped back to the actor as a message and continue under the actors concurrency constraint.

However, PipeTo pattern is still the preferred way to perform async operations inside an actor, as it is more explicit and clearly states what is going on.

Switchable Behaviors In order to make the switchable behavior APIs more understandable for both UntypedActor and ReceiveActor we've updated the methods to the following:

Become(newHandler); // become newHandler, without adding previous behavior to the stack (default)
BecomeStacked(newHandler); // become newHandler, without adding previous behavior to the stack (default)
UnbecomeStacked(); //revert to the previous behavior in the stack

The underlying behavior-switching implementation hasn't changed at all - only the names of the methods.

Scheduler APIs The Context.System.Scheduler API has been overhauled to be both more extensible and understandable going forward. All of the previous capabilities for the Scheduler are still available, only in different packaging than they were before.

Here are the new APIs:

Context.System.Scheduler
  .ScheduleTellOnce(TimeSpan delay, ICanTell receiver, object message, ActorRef sender);
  .ScheduleTellOnce(TimeSpan delay, ICanTell receiver, object message, ActorRef sender, ICancelable cancelable);
  .ScheduleTellRepeatedly(TimeSpan initialDelay, TimeSpan interval, ICanTell receiver, object message, ActorRef sender);
  .ScheduleTellRepeatedly(TimeSpan initialDelay, TimeSpan interval, ICanTell receiver, object message, ActorRef sender, ICancelable cancelable);

Context.System.Scheduler.Advanced
  .ScheduleOnce(TimeSpan delay, Action action);
  .ScheduleOnce(TimeSpan delay, Action action, ICancelable cancelable);
  .ScheduleRepeatedly(TimeSpan initialDelay, TimeSpan interval, Action action);
  .ScheduleRepeatedly(TimeSpan initialDelay, TimeSpan interval, Action action, ICancelable cancelable);

There's also a set of extension methods for specifying delays and intervals in milliseconds as well as methods for all four variants (ScheduleTellOnceCancelable, ScheduleTellRepeatedlyCancelable, ScheduleOnceCancelable, ScheduleRepeatedlyCancelable) that creates a cancelable, schedules, and returns the cancelable.

Akka.NET Config now loaded automatically from App.config and Web.config In previous versions Akka.NET users had to do the following to load Akka.NET HOCON configuration sections from App.config or Web.config:

var section = (AkkaConfigurationSection)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("akka");
var config = section.AkkaConfig;
var actorSystem = ActorSystem.Create("MySystem", config);

As of Akka.NET v1.0 this is now done for you automatically:

var actorSystem = ActorSystem.Create("MySystem"); //automatically loads App/Web.config, if any

Dispatchers Akka.NET v1.0 introduces the ForkJoinDispatcher as well as general purpose dispatcher re-use.

Using ForkJoinDispatcher ForkJoinDispatcher is special - it uses Helios.Concurrency.DedicatedThreadPool to create a dedicated set of threads for the exclusive use of the actors configured to use a particular ForkJoinDispatcher instance. All of the remoting actors depend on the default-remote-dispatcher for instance.

Here's how you can create your own ForkJoinDispatcher instances via Config:

myapp{
  my-forkjoin-dispatcher{
    type = ForkJoinDispatcher
    throughput = 100
    dedicated-thread-pool{ #settings for Helios.DedicatedThreadPool
      thread-count = 3 #number of threads
      #deadlock-timeout = 3s #optional timeout for deadlock detection
      threadtype = background #values can be "background" or "foreground"
    }
  }
}
}

You can then use this specific ForkJoinDispatcher instance by configuring specific actors to use it, whether it's via config or the fluent interface on Props:

Config

akka.actor.deploy{
     /myActor1{
       dispatcher = myapp.my-forkjoin-dispatcher
     }
}

Props

var actor = Sys.ActorOf(Props.Create<Foo>().WithDispatcher("myapp.my-forkjoin-dispatcher"));

FluentConfiguration [REMOVED] FluentConfig has been removed as we've decided to standardize on HOCON configuration, but if you still want to use the old FluentConfig bits you can find them here: https://github.com/rogeralsing/Akka.FluentConfig

F# API The F# API has changed to reflect the other C# interface changes, as well as unique additions specific to F#.

In addition to updating the F# API, we've also fixed a long-standing bug with being able to serialize discriminated unions over the wire. This has been resolved.

Interface Renames In order to comply with .NET naming conventions and standards, all of the following interfaces have been renamed with the I{InterfaceName} prefix.

The following interfaces have all been renamed to include the I prefix:

  • Akka.Actor.ActorRefProvider, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Actor.ActorRefScope, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Actor.AutoReceivedMessage, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Actor.Cell, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Actor.Inboxable, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Actor.IndirectActorProducer, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Actor.Internal.ChildrenContainer, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Actor.Internal.ChildStats, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Actor.Internal.InternalSupportsTestFSMRef2, Akka` (Public)
  • Akka.Actor.Internal.SuspendReason+WaitingForChildren, Akka
  • Akka.Actor.Internals.InitializableActor, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Actor.LocalRef, Akka
  • Akka.Actor.LoggingFSM, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Actor.NoSerializationVerificationNeeded, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Actor.PossiblyHarmful, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Actor.RepointableRef, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Actor.WithBoundedStash, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Actor.WithUnboundedStash, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Dispatch.BlockingMessageQueueSemantics, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Dispatch.BoundedDequeBasedMessageQueueSemantics, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Dispatch.BoundedMessageQueueSemantics, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Dispatch.DequeBasedMailbox, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Dispatch.DequeBasedMessageQueueSemantics, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Dispatch.MessageQueues.MessageQueue, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Dispatch.MultipleConsumerSemantics, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Dispatch.RequiresMessageQueue1, Akka` (Public)
  • Akka.Dispatch.Semantics, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Dispatch.SysMsg.SystemMessage, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Dispatch.UnboundedDequeBasedMessageQueueSemantics, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Dispatch.UnboundedMessageQueueSemantics, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Event.LoggingAdapter, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.FluentConfigInternals, Akka (Public)
  • Akka.Remote.InboundMessageDispatcher, Akka.Remote
  • Akka.Remote.RemoteRef, Akka.Remote
  • Akka.Routing.ConsistentHashable, Akka (Public)

ConsistentHashRouter and IConsistentHashable Akka.NET v1.0 introduces the idea of virtual nodes to the ConsistentHashRouter, which are designed to provide more even distributions of hash ranges across a relatively small number of routees. You can take advantage of virtual nodes via configuration:

akka.actor.deployment {
	/router1 {
		router = consistent-hashing-pool
		nr-of-instances = 3
		virtual-nodes-factor = 17
	}
}

Or via code:

var router4 = Sys.ActorOf(Props.Empty.WithRouter(
	new ConsistentHashingGroup(new[]{c},hashMapping: hashMapping)
	.WithVirtualNodesFactor(5)), 
	"router4");

ConsistentHashMapping Delegate There are three ways to instruct a router to hash a message:

  1. Wrap the message in a ConsistentHashableEnvelope;
  2. Implement the IConsistentHashable interface on your message types; or
  3. Or, write a ConsistentHashMapper delegate and pass it to a ConsistentHashingGroup or a ConsistentHashingPool programmatically at create time.

Here's an example, taken from the ConsistentHashSpecs:

ConsistentHashMapping hashMapping = msg =>
{
    if (msg is Msg2)
    {
        var m2 = msg as Msg2;
        return m2.Key;
    }

    return null;
};
var router2 =
    Sys.ActorOf(new ConsistentHashingPool(1, null, null, null, hashMapping: hashMapping)
    .Props(Props.Create<Echo>()), "router2");

Alternatively, you don't have to pass the ConsistentHashMapping into the constructor - you can use the WithHashMapping fluent interface built on top of both ConsistentHashingGroup and ConsistentHashingPool:

var router2 =
    Sys.ActorOf(new ConsistentHashingPool(1).WithHashMapping(hashMapping)
    .Props(Props.Create<Echo>()), "router2");

ConsistentHashable renamed to IConsistentHashable Any objects you may have decorated with the ConsistentHashable interface to work with ConsistentHashRouter instances will need to implement IConsistentHashable going forward, as all interfaces have been renamed with the I- prefix per .NET naming conventions.

Akka.DI.Unity NuGet Package Akka.NET now ships with dependency injection support for Unity.

You can install our Unity package via the following command in the NuGet package manager console:

PM> Install-Package Akka.DI.Unity

0.8.0 Feb 11 2015

Dependency Injection support for Ninject, Castle Windsor, and AutoFac. Thanks to some amazing effort from individual contributor (@jcwrequests), Akka.NET now has direct dependency injection support for Ninject, Castle Windsor, and AutoFac.

Here's an example using Ninject, for instance:

// Create and build your container 
var container = new Ninject.StandardKernel(); 
container.Bind().To(typeof(TypedWorker)); 
container.Bind().To(typeof(WorkerService));

// Create the ActorSystem and Dependency Resolver 
var system = ActorSystem.Create("MySystem"); 
var propsResolver = new NinjectDependencyResolver(container,system);

//Create some actors who need Ninject
var worker1 = system.ActorOf(propsResolver.Create<TypedWorker>(), "Worker1");
var worker2 = system.ActorOf(propsResolver.Create<TypedWorker>(), "Worker2");

//send them messages
worker1.Tell("hi!");

You can install these DI plugins for Akka.NET via NuGet - here's how:

  • Ninject - install-package Akka.DI.Ninject
  • Castle Windsor - install-package Akka.DI.CastleWindsor
  • AutoFac - install-package Akka.DI.AutoFac

Read the full Dependency Injection with Akka.NET documentation here.

Persistent Actors with Akka.Persistence (Alpha). Core contributor @Horusiath ported the majority of Akka's Akka.Persistence and Akka.Persistence.TestKit modules.

Even in the core Akka project these modules are considered to be "experimental," but the goal is to provide actors with a way of automatically saving and recovering their internal state to a configurable durable store - such as a database or filesystem.

Akka.Persistence also introduces the notion of reliable delivery of messages, achieved through the GuaranteedDeliveryActor.

Akka.Persistence also ships with an FSharp API out of the box, so while this package is in beta you can start playing with it either F# or C# from day one.

If you want to play with Akka.Persistence, please install any one of the following packages:

  • Akka.Persistence - install-package Akka.Persistence -pre
  • Akka.Persistence.FSharp - install-package Akka.Persistence.FSharp -pre
  • Akka.Persistence.TestKit - install-package Akka.Persistence.TestKit -pre

Read the full Persistent Actors with Akka.NET documentation here.

Remote Deployment of Routers and Routees. You can now remotely deploy routers and routees via configuration, like so:

Deploying routees remotely via Config:

actor.deployment {
    /blub {
      router = round-robin-pool
      nr-of-instances = 2
      target.nodes = [""akka.tcp://${sysName}@localhost:${port}""]
    }
}

var router = masterActorSystem.ActorOf(new RoundRobinPool(2).Props(Props.Create<Echo>()), "blub");

When deploying a router via configuration, just specify the target.nodes property with a list of Address instances for each node you want to deploy your routees.

NOTE: Remote deployment of routees only works for Pool routers.

Deploying routers remotely via Config:

actor.deployment {
    /blub {
      router = round-robin-pool
      nr-of-instances = 2
      remote = ""akka.tcp://${sysName}@localhost:${port}""
    }
}

var router = masterActorSystem.ActorOf(Props.Create<Echo>().WithRouter(FromConfig.Instance), "blub");

Works just like remote deployment of actors.

If you want to deploy a router remotely via explicit configuration, you can do it in code like this via the RemoteScope and RemoteRouterConfig:

Deploying routees remotely via explicit configuration:

var intendedRemoteAddress = Address.Parse("akka.tcp://${sysName}@localhost:${port}"
.Replace("${sysName}", sysName)
.Replace("${port}", port.ToString()));

 var router = myActorSystem.ActorOf(new RoundRobinPool(2).Props(Props.Create<Echo>())
.WithDeploy(new Deploy(
	new RemoteScope(intendedRemoteAddress.Copy()))), "myRemoteRouter");

Deploying routers remotely via explicit configuration:

var intendedRemoteAddress = Address.Parse("akka.tcp://${sysName}@localhost:${port}"
.Replace("${sysName}", sysName)
.Replace("${port}", port.ToString()));

 var router = myActorSystem.ActorOf(
	new RemoteRouterConfig(
	new RoundRobinPool(2), new[] { new Address("akka.tcp", sysName, "localhost", port) })
    .Props(Props.Create<Echo>()), "blub2");

Improved Serialization and Remote Deployment Support. All internals related to serialization and remote deployment have undergone vast improvements in order to support the other work that went into this release.

Pluggable Actor Creation Pipeline. We reworked the plumbing that's used to provide automatic Stash support and exposed it as a pluggable actor creation pipeline for local actors.

This release adds the ActorProducerPipeline, which is accessible from ExtendedActorSystem (to be able to configure by plugins) and allows you to inject custom hooks satisfying following interface:

interface IActorProducerPlugin {
    bool CanBeAppliedTo(ActorBase actor);
    void AfterActorCreated(ActorBase actor, IActorContext context);
    void BeforeActorTerminated(ActorBase actor, IActorContext context);
}
  • CanBeAppliedTo determines if plugin can be applied to specific actor instance.
  • AfterActorCreated is applied to actor after it has been instantiated by an ActorCell and before InitializableActor.Init method will (optionally) be invoked.
  • BeforeActorTerminated is applied before actor terminates and before IDisposable.Dispose method will be invoked (for disposable actors) - auto handling disposable actors is second feature of this commit.

For common use it's better to create custom classes inheriting from ActorProducerPluginBase and ActorProducerPluginBase<TActor> classes.

Pipeline itself provides following interface:

class ActorProducerPipeline : IEnumerable<IActorProducerPlugin> {
    int Count { get; } // current plugins count - 1 by default (ActorStashPlugin)
    bool Register(IActorProducerPlugin plugin)
    bool Unregister(IActorProducerPlugin plugin)
    bool IsRegistered(IActorProducerPlugin plugin)
    bool Insert(int index, IActorProducerPlugin plugin)
}
  • Register - registers a plugin if no other plugin of the same type has been registered already (plugins with generic types are counted separately). Returns true if plugin has been registered.
  • Insert - same as register, but plugin will be placed in specific place inside the pipeline - useful if any plugins precedence is required.
  • Unregister - unregisters specified plugin if it has been found. Returns true if plugin was found and unregistered.
  • IsRegistered - checks if plugin has been already registered.

By default pipeline is filled with one already used plugin - ActorStashPlugin, which replaces stash initialization/unstashing mechanism used up to this moment.

MultiNodeTestRunner and Akka.Remote.TestKit. The MultiNodeTestRunner and the Multi Node TestKit (Akka.Remote.TestKit) underwent some drastic changes in this update. They're still not quite ready for public use yet, but if you want to see what the experience is like you can clone the Akka.NET Github repository and run the following command:

C:\akkadotnet> .\build.cmd MultiNodeTests

This will automatically launch all MultiNodeSpec instances found inside Akka.Cluster.Tests. We'll need to make this more flexible to be able to run other assemblies that require multinode tests in the future.

These tests are not enabled by default in normal build runs, but they will at some point in the future.

Here's a sample of the output from the console, to give you a sense of what the reporting looks like:

image

The MultiNodeTestRunner uses XUnit internally and will dynamically deploy as many processes are needed to satisfy any individual test. Has been tested with up to 6 processes.

0.7.1 Dec 13 2014

Brand New F# API. The entire F# API has been updated to give it a more native F# feel while still holding true to the Erlang / Scala conventions used in actor systems. Read more about the F# API changes.

Multi-Node TestKit (Alpha). Not available yet as a NuGet package, but the first pass at the Akka.Remote.TestKit is now available from source, which allow you to test your actor systems running on multiple machines or processes.

A multi-node test looks like this

public class InitialHeartbeatMultiNode1 : InitialHeartbeatSpec
{
}

public class InitialHeartbeatMultiNode2 : InitialHeartbeatSpec
{
}

public class InitialHeartbeatMultiNode3 : InitialHeartbeatSpec
{
}

public abstract class InitialHeartbeatSpec : MultiNodeClusterSpec

The MultiNodeTestRunner looks at this, works out that it needs to create 3 processes to run 3 nodes for the test. It executes NodeTestRunner in each process to do this passing parameters on the command line. Read more about the multi-node testkit here.

Breaking Change to the internal api: The Next property on IAtomicCounter<T> has been changed into the function Next() This was done as it had side effects, i.e. the value was increased when the getter was called. This makes it very hard to debug as the debugger kept calling the property and causing the value to be increased.

Akka.Serilog SerilogLogMessageFormatter has been moved to the namespace Akka.Logger.Serilog (it used to be in Akka.Serilog.Event.Serilog). Update your using statements from using Akka.Serilog.Event.Serilog; to using Akka.Logger.Serilog;.

Breaking Change to the internal api: Changed signatures in the abstract class SupervisorStrategy. The following methods has new signatures: HandleFailure, ProcessFailure. If you've inherited from SupervisorStrategy, OneForOneStrategy or AllForOneStrategy and overridden the aforementioned methods you need to update their signatures.

TestProbe can be implicitly casted to ActorRef. New feature. Tests requiring the ActorRef of a TestProbe can now be simplified:

var probe = CreateTestProbe();
var sut = ActorOf<GreeterActor>();
sut.Tell("Akka", probe); // previously probe.Ref was required
probe.ExpectMsg("Hi Akka!");

Bugfix for ConsistentHashableEvenlope. When using ConsistentHashableEvenlope in conjunction with ConsistentHashRouters, ConsistentHashableEvenlope now correctly extracts its inner message instead of sending the entire ConsistentHashableEvenlope directly to the intended routee.

Akka.Cluster group routers now work as expected. New update of Akka.Cluster - group routers now work as expected on cluster deployments. Still working on pool routers. Read more about Akka.Cluster routers here.

0.7.0 Oct 16 2014

Major new changes and additions in this release, including some breaking changes...

Akka.Cluster Support (pre-release) - Akka.Cluster is now available on NuGet as a pre-release package (has a -pre suffix) and is available for testing. After installing the the Akka.Cluster module you can add take advantage of clustering via configuration, like so:

akka {
    actor {
      provider = "Akka.Cluster.ClusterActorRefProvider, Akka.Cluster"
    }

    remote {
      log-remote-lifecycle-events = DEBUG
      helios.tcp {
    hostname = "127.0.0.1"
    port = 0
      }
    }

    cluster {
      seed-nodes = [
    "akka.tcp://ClusterSystem@127.0.0.1:2551",
    "akka.tcp://ClusterSystem@127.0.0.1:2552"]

      auto-down-unreachable-after = 10s
    }
  }

And then use cluster-enabled routing on individual, named routers:

/myAppRouter {
 router = consistent-hashing-pool
  nr-of-instances = 100
  cluster {
    enabled = on
    max-nr-of-instances-per-node = 3
    allow-local-routees = off
    use-role = backend
  }
}

For more information on how clustering works, please see akkadotnet#400

Breaking Changes: Improved Stashing - The old WithUnboundedStash and WithBoundedStash interfaces have been slightly changed and the CurrentStash property has been renamed to Stash. Any old stashing code can be replaced with the following in order to continue working:

public IStash CurrentStash { get { return Stash; } set { Stash=value; } }

The Stash field is now automatically populated with an appropriate stash during the actor creation process and there is no need to set this field at all yourself.

Breaking Changes: Renamed Logger Namespaces - The namespaces, DLL names, and NuGet packages for all logger add-ons have been changed to Akka.Loggers.Xyz. Please install the latest NuGet package (and uninstall the old ones) and update your Akka HOCON configurations accordingly.

Serilog Support - Akka.NET now has an official Serilog logger that you can install via the Akka.Logger.Serilog package. You can register the serilog logger via your HOCON configuration like this:

 akka.loggers=["Akka.Logger.Serilog.SerilogLogger, Akka.Logger.Serilog"]

New Feature: Priority Mailbox - The PriorityMailbox allows you to define the priority of messages handled by your actors, and this is done by creating your own subclass of either the UnboundedPriorityMailbox or BoundedPriorityMailbox class and implementing the PriorityGenerator method like so:

public class ReplayMailbox : UnboundedPriorityMailbox
{
    protected override int PriorityGenerator(object message)
    {
        if (message is HttpResponseMessage) return 1;
        if (!(message is LoggedHttpRequest)) return 2;
        return 3;
    }
}

The smaller the return value from the PriorityGenerator, the higher the priority of the message. You can then configure your actors to use this mailbox via configuration, using a fully-qualified name:

replay-mailbox {
 mailbox-type: "TrafficSimulator.PlaybackApp.Actors.ReplayMailbox,TrafficSimulator.PlaybackApp"
}

And from this point onward, any actor can be configured to use this mailbox via Props:

Context.ActorOf(Props.Create<ReplayActor>()
                    .WithRouter(new RoundRobinPool(3))
                    .WithMailbox("replay-mailbox"));

New Feature: Test Your Akka.NET Apps Using Akka.TestKit - We've refactored the testing framework used for testing Akka.NET's internals into a test-framework-agnostic NuGet package you can use for unit and integration testing your own Akka.NET apps. Right now we're scarce on documentation so you'll want to take a look at the tests inside the Akka.NET source for reference.

Right now we have Akka.TestKit adapters for both MSTest and XUnit, which you can install to your own project via the following:

MSTest:

install-package Akka.TestKit.VsTest

XUnit:

install-package Akka.TestKit.Xunit

New Feature: Logging to Standard Out is now done in color - This new feature can be disabled by setting StandardOutLogger.UseColors = false;. Colors can be customized: StandardOutLogger.DebugColor = ConsoleColor.Green;. If you need to print to stdout directly use Akka.Util.StandardOutWriter.Write() instead of Console.WriteLine, otherwise your messages might get printed in the wrong color.

0.6.4 Sep 9 2014

  • Introduced TailChoppingRouter
  • All ActorSystem extensions now take an ExtendedActorSystem as a dependency - all third party actor system extensions will need to update accordingly.
  • Fixed numerous bugs with remote deployment of actors.
  • Fixed a live-lock issue for high-traffic connections on Akka.Remote and introduced softer heartbeat failure deadlines.
  • Changed the configuration chaining process.
  • Removed obsolete attributes from PatternMatch and UntypedActor.
  • Laying groundwork for initial Mono support.

0.6.3 Aug 13 2014

  • Made it so HOCON config sections chain properly
  • Optimized actor memory footprint
  • Fixed a Helios bug that caused Akka.NET to drop messages larger than 32kb

0.6.2 Aug 05 2014

  • Upgraded Helios dependency
  • Bug fixes
  • Improved F# API
  • Resizeable Router support
  • Inbox support - an actor-like object that can be subscribed to by external objects
  • Web.config and App.config support for Akka HOCON configuration

0.6.1 Jul 09 2014

  • Upgraded Helios dependency
  • Added ConsistentHash router support
  • Numerous bug fixes
  • Added ReceiveBuilder support

0.2.1-beta Mars 22 2014

  • Nuget package