In Unit 1, we will learn the fundamentals of how the actor model and Akka.NET work.
*NIX systems have the tail
command built-in to monitor changes to a file (such as tailing log files), whereas Windows does not. We will recreate tail
for Windows and use the process to learn the fundamentals.
In Unit 1 you will learn:
- How to create your own
ActorSystem
and actors; - How to send messages actors and how to handle different types of messages;
- How to use
Props
andIActorRef
s to build loosely coupled systems. - How to use actor paths, addresses, and
ActorSelection
to send messages to actors. - How to create child actors and actor hierarchies, and how to supervise children with
SupervisionStrategy
. - How to use the Actor lifecycle to control actor startup, shutdown, and restart behavior.
In Unit 2, we're going to get into some more of the intermediate Akka.NET features to build a more sophisticated application than what we accomplished at the end of unit 1.
In Unit 2 you will learn:
- How to use HOCON configuration to configure your actors via App.config and Web.config;
- How to configure your actor's Dispatcher to run on the Windows Forms UI thread, so actors can make operations directly on UI elements without needing to change contexts;
- How to handle more sophisticated types of pattern matching using
ReceiveActor
; - How to use the
Scheduler
to send recurring messages to actors; - How to use the Publish-subscribe (pub-sub) pattern between actors;
- How and why to switch actor's behavior at run-time; and
- How to
Stash
messages for deferred processing.
In Unit 3, we will learn how to use actors for parallelism and scale-out using Octokit and data from Github repos!
In Unit 3 you will learn:
- How to perform work asynchronously inside your actors using
PipeTo
; - How to use
Ask
to wait inline for actors to respond to your messages; - How to use
ReceiveTimeout
to time out replies from other actors; - How to use
Group
routers to divide work among your actors; - How to use
Pool
routers to automatically create and manage pools of actors; and - How to use HOCON to configure your routers.