What is proposed way to create Actor Model Applications with Mesh?

[ddobric]

SF-Mesh supports application and technology independent model, which is great. However, right now, we do not have VS templates for actor model based services. What is the proposed way to do that with mesh? Are you going to provide the VS template or we have to do it some other way?

If we are going to to add services in containers (no VS template and not even MS technology), what is the proposed way regarding tooling to do that? To means VS user, perfect solution would look like:

• Right mouse click on Mesh Project in the VS solution.
• Add New Service
• Select Service type (Actor, Console,.., DOCKER)
• Select docker (because no template available)
• Add service

Are you going to provide such kind of experience or we should manually tweak YAML files as K8 folks do that? In my opinion digging in deployment files without tooling is last powerful option, but it is worst one when thinking about productivity.

[mikkelhegn]

Great question :-) As you point out, as Mesh is agnostic to what you run, there are a few different paths we are working on enabling with the tooling support.

Any container you already have built, you can deploy via an ARM template using existing Azure RP clients (PowerShell, CLI, SDKs and REST). Recently a VS Code extension also emerged: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=mfery.sf-mesh-tools

Visual Studio provides an end-to-end experience with local debugging in containers in SF, as well as project structuring and deployment support. This makes the work to have broad support lot harder, so there is less we can commit to support. (E.g. there is some integration we need to do with the template types to support debugging inside containers locally). Today we have a few templates for .net as an easy way to get you started developing and deploying to Mesh and we will expand this support one way or the other. In an upcoming release we will make it easy to add Reliable Collections to those templates.

For your suggestion about the path where no template is available is a valid scenario, but we need to figure out what the debug story is for those cases.

We are adding an experience to add an .sfa project and the yaml files to an existing project(s) in an existing solution as well.

Adding a few folks for visibility and comments: @BigMorty, @raunakpandya and @suhuruli