Minimal Orleans Application and Running in a Stand-Alone Silo tutorial outdated

[attilah]

Minimal Orleans Application and Running in a Stand-Alone Silo is outdated, need to revisit and update against the newest packages we've, some screenshots also need to be updated.

[attilah]

You can find the docs in the gh-pages branch.

[snarlynarwhal]

Forgive my lack of experience - I am new to working with open source projects and with markdown documentation. I forked the repo and switched to the gh-pages branch, but when I attempted to build, I got tons of build errors: Error occurred while restoring NuGet packages: Could not find file. It's a ton of .json files.

[sergeybykov]

Are you trying to build as described in https://github.com/dotnet/orleans/blob/gh-pages/readme.md?

docfx src\docfx.json

[snarlynarwhal]

Oops, I missed that. I got it working now, thanks!

[miker1423]

Hello! I made some changes to the tutorial on my own fork of Orleans, here is the commit, what do you think about it? https://github.com/miker1423/orleans/commit/11fb5f813448c32e04c122f086b9090673403563

[sergeybykov]

@miker1423 I added a comment there.

[raghav710]

I'd like to add some points to the discussion. I tried the stand alone silo example today and found that

• I had to add the orleans CodeGenerator nuget package to the silo host project
• While running the OrleansHost.exe in the grains collection project with the config as given here, I still get a System.IO.FileNotFoundException for the 'System.Reflection.Metadata, Version=1.2.0.0 assembly even though the config explicitly states it as v1.3.0.0 (similar to this issue)[https://github.com/dotnet/orleans/issues/2795]
• In the docs it says "You also need to add a OrleansConfiguration.xml file" shall we change it to explicitly state to create this in the GrainsCollection? since in the Minimal Orleans example it was created in the Host application I am using VS 2015 Professional, .NET framework 4.6.1 and Orleans v1.4.1.0

Here is my Orleans.exe.config (which is set to Copy if newer)

<configuration>
  <system.diagnostics>
    <trace autoflush="true" indentsize="0">
      <listeners>
        <remove name="*" />
      </listeners>
    </trace>
    <switches>
      <add name="traceLevel" value="2" />
    </switches>
  </system.diagnostics>
  <startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true">
    <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5"/>
  </startup>
  <runtime>
    <gcServer enabled="true"/>
    <gcConcurrent enabled="false"/>
    <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
      <dependentAssembly>
        <assemblyIdentity name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime" publicKeyToken="31BF3856AD364E35" culture="neutral"/>
        <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-2.4.0.0" newVersion="2.4.0.0"/>
      </dependentAssembly>
      <dependentAssembly>
        <assemblyIdentity name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Configuration" publicKeyToken="31BF3856AD364E35" culture="neutral"/>
        <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-2.0.0.0" newVersion="2.0.0.0"/>
      </dependentAssembly>
      <dependentAssembly>
        <assemblyIdentity name="Newtonsoft.Json" publicKeyToken="30ad4fe6b2a6aeed" culture="neutral" />
        <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-7.0.0.0" newVersion="7.0.0.0" />
      </dependentAssembly>
      <dependentAssembly>
        <assemblyIdentity name="System.Runtime" publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a" culture="neutral" />
        <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-4.1.0.0" newVersion="4.1.0.0" />
      </dependentAssembly>
      <dependentAssembly>
        <assemblyIdentity name="System.Runtime.Extensions" publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a" culture="neutral" />
        <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-4.1.0.0" newVersion="4.1.0.0" />
      </dependentAssembly>
      <dependentAssembly>
        <assemblyIdentity name="System.Collections.Immutable" publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a" culture="neutral" />
        <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-1.2.0.0" newVersion="1.2.0.0" />
      </dependentAssembly>
      <dependentAssembly>
        <assemblyIdentity name="System.Reflection.Metadata" publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a" culture="neutral" />
        <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-1.3.0.0" newVersion="1.3.0.0" />
      </dependentAssembly>
      <dependentAssembly>
        <assemblyIdentity name="System.Runtime.InteropServices" publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a" culture="neutral" />
        <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-4.1.0.0" newVersion="4.1.0.0" />
      </dependentAssembly>
      <dependentAssembly>
        <assemblyIdentity name="System.Reflection" publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a" culture="neutral" />
        <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-4.1.0.0" newVersion="4.1.0.0" />
      </dependentAssembly>
    </assemblyBinding>
  </runtime>
</configuration>

and here is my GrainsCollection app config:

<configuration>
  <runtime>
    <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
      <dependentAssembly>
        <assemblyIdentity name="System.Collections.Immutable" publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a" culture="neutral" />
        <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-1.2.0.0" newVersion="1.2.0.0" />
      </dependentAssembly>
      <dependentAssembly>
        <assemblyIdentity name="System.Reflection.Metadata" publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a" culture="neutral" />
        <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-1.3.0.0" newVersion="1.3.0.0" />
      </dependentAssembly>
    </assemblyBinding>
  </runtime>
</configuration>

[dandago]

Aside from being outdated, the steps to set up a proper Orleans project are scattered across the documentation. I had written an article gathering those steps in one place, in case it helps.

Since I wrote that article, I learned that the AppDomain stuff is not necessary unless you're running silo and client in the same program. Also, the client code will need to be revised when Orleans 1.5 is released, since it introduces a non-static grain client.

There might be other things that need to be updated, and it would be good to mention them here.