The link in VS that brings me here has other items that dont seem to be explained here

[StingyJack]

Can they be added to this?

---

Document Details

⚠ Do not edit this section. It is required for docs.microsoft.com ➟ GitHub issue linking.

• ID: 3087d087-02d5-0ae2-5276-b8a24b5dd5ef
• Version Independent ID: 38ce6ed2-1640-4e48-f1e4-f5442f1c6714
• Content: Service Fabric programming model overview
• Content Source: articles/service-fabric/service-fabric-choose-framework.md
• Service: service-fabric
• GitHub Login: @vturecek
• Microsoft Alias: vturecek

[Mike-Ubezzi-MSFT]

@StingyJack Thank you for the detailed feedback. We are actively investigating and will get back to you soon.

[mimckitt]

@StingyJack valid point. I will assign to the authors to review and see if we can add more information.

@aljo-microsoft @vturecek can you take a look? Seems like if we are linking customers to this page it should cover all the deployment options.

[aljo-microsoft]

@StingyJack and @MicahMcKittrick-MSFT I'm not sure what additional information you are looking for?

The referenced document and screen shot depict the frame work choices:

Guest executables Containers Reliable Services ASP.NET Core Reliable Actors

[mimckitt]

@aljo-microsoft from my understanding, user sees 12 choices in VS. They are linked to this doc which as you mentioned does give an overview of them. But I believe they are looking for a bit more detail about each specific one.

I will let @StingyJack confirm though to ensure I am understanding his ask.

[aljo-microsoft]

@StingyJack Visual Studio's New Service Fabric Service Select A Template provides 12 templates that are groups into the following 3 categories: .NET Core, Hosted Containers and Applications, and .NET Framework.

To optimize for portability of your Application, its recommended you containerize all of your services and use .NET Core.

Explicitly this means you should default to building a Container Service Fabric service; unless your use case doesn't support containers.

To optimize for simplicity of your code, its recommended you use our programming models, Reliable Services and/or Reliable Actors, when containers are not appropriate for your use case.

Explicitly this means when containers are not appropriate for your use case, you would use Reliable Actors if:

• Your problem space involves a large number (thousands or more) of small, independent, and isolated units of state and logic.
• You want to work with single-threaded objects that do not require significant interaction from external components, including querying state across a set of actors.
• Your actor instances won't block callers with unpredictable delays by issuing I/O operations.

Ref: https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/service-fabric/service-fabric-reliable-actors-introduction

or you would use Reliable Services if:

• You want your service's code (and optionally state) to be highly available and reliable
• You need transactional guarantees across multiple units of state (for example, orders and order line items).
• Your application’s state can be naturally modeled as Reliable Dictionaries and Queues.
• Your applications code or state needs to be highly available with low latency reads and writes.
• Your application needs to control the concurrency or granularity of transacted operations across one or more Reliable Collections.
• You want to manage the communications or control the partitioning scheme for your service.
• Your code needs a free-threaded runtime environment.
• Your application needs to dynamically create or destroy Reliable Dictionaries or Queues or whole Services at runtime.
• You need to programmatically control Service Fabric-provided backup and restore features for your service’s state.
• Your application needs to maintain change history for its units of state.
• You want to develop or consume third-party-developed, custom state providers.

Ref: https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/service-fabric/service-fabric-reliable-services-introduction

When using our programming models, you should default to use .Net Core, unless your use case requires using .NET Framework; the following is when full .Net Framework is appropriate:

• Current .NET Framework applications
• A need to use third-party .NET libraries or NuGet packages not available for .NET Core
• A need to use .NET technologies not available for .NET Core
• A need to use a platform that doesn’t support .NET Core

https://docs.microsoft.com/dotnet/standard/choosing-core-framework-server

Given that above dotnet standard documentation is out of date, the following PR is to remove the out of date statement that Reliable Services and Actors only support .Net Framework: https://github.com/dotnet/docs/pull/10193

As our programming models support .Netcore and .Net Framework:

Using Guest Services is for classic service modernization support, and provides the following benefits:

• High availability. Applications that run in Service Fabric are made highly available. Service Fabric ensures that instances of an application are running.
• Health monitoring. Service Fabric health monitoring detects if an application is running, and provides diagnostic information if there is a failure.
• Application lifecycle management. Besides providing upgrades with no downtime, Service Fabric provides automatic rollback to the previous version if there is a bad health event reported during an upgrade.
• Density. You can run multiple applications in a cluster, which eliminates the need for each application to run on its own hardware.
• Discoverability: Using REST you can call the Service Fabric Naming service to find other services in the cluster.

Ref: https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/service-fabric/service-fabric-guest-executables-introduction

Explicitly you shouldn't be creating net new innovative guest services, and it is highly recommended you containerize new services.

@MicahMcKittrick-MSFT My assumption is the user may have found the doc I created the PR for that caused confusion when reviewing our documentation; as our documentation is without error, and Visual Studio's UI seems to be pretty clear about the framework being used.

If the user is satisfied with this answer provided; #please-close. As a PR was created for the public doc issue that wasn't referenced, but is assumed to have caused confusion.

[StingyJack]

@aljo-microsoft - Thanks but there are no "Reliable" services in the screenshot depicted above. Not being able to find anything other than the descriptions in VS about the stateful / stateless is what prompted my question. I got to the page for this feedback by clicked on the "learn more" link in the screenshot. If you have clearer or more detailed descriptions about the stateful and stateless (sounds like an azure function to me), that would be awesome.

Explicitly you shouldn't be creating net new innovative guest services, and it is highly recommended you containerize new services.

That would be great if docker would actually run so I could understand what its supposed to do. But it doesn't run and each attempt to make it work feels like its going to eat all of my time. Then the thing doesn't uninstall properly and nobody in that project/community seems to care once you mention "docker for windows" (and they have the worst github bot ever).