Welcome to Akka.NET Bootcamp! This is a free, self-directed learning course brought to you by the folks at Petabridge.
Over the three units of this bootcamp you will learn how to create fully-functional, real-world programs using Akka.NET actors and many other parts of the core Akka.NET framework!
We will start with some basic actors and have you progressively work your way up to larger, more sophisticated examples.
The course is self-directed learning. You can do it at whatever pace you wish. You can sign up here to have one Akka.NET Bootcamp lesson emailed to you daily if you'd like a little help pacing yourself throughout the course.
NOTE: F# support is in progress (see the FSharp branch). We will happily accept F# pull requests. Feel free to send them in.
In Akka.NET Bootcamp you will learn how to use Akka.NET actors to build reactive, concurrent applications.
You will learn how to build types of applications that may have seemed impossible or really, really hard to make prior to learning Akka.NET. You will walk away from this bootcamp with the confidence to handle bigger and harder problems than ever before!
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:
ActorSystem
and actors;Props
and IActorRef
s to build loosely coupled systems.ActorSelection
to send messages to actors.SupervisionStrategy
.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:
ReceiveActor
;Scheduler
to send recurring messages to actors;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:
PipeTo
;Ask
to wait inline for actors to respond to your messages;ReceiveTimeout
to time out replies from other actors;Group
routers to divide work among your actors;Pool
routers to automatically create and manage pools of actors; andHere's how Akka.NET bootcamp works!
This Github repository contains Visual Studio solution files and other assets you will need to complete the bootcamp.
Thus, if you want to follow the bootcamp we recommend doing the following:
Akka.NET Bootcamp consists of three modules:
Each module contains the following structure (using Unit 1 as an example:)
src\Unit1\README.MD - table of contents and instructions for the module
src\Unit1\DoThis\ - contains the .SLN and project files that you will use through all lessons
-- lesson 1
src\Unit1\Lesson1\README.MD - README explaining lesson1
src\Unit1\Lesson1\DoThis\ - C# classes, etc...
src\Unit1\Lesson1\Completed\ - "Expected" output after completing lesson
-- repeat for all lessons
Start with the first lesson in each unit and follow the links through their README files on Github. We're going to begin with Unit 1, Lesson 1.
Each Akka.NET Bootcamp lesson contains a README which explains the following:
Unit-[Num]/DoThis/
to match the expected output at the end of each lesson./Completed/
folder that shows the full source code that will produce the expected output. You can compare this against your own code and see what you need to do differently.A few things to bear in mind when you're following the step-by-step instructions:
/Completed
folder for that lesson.We will provide explanations of all key concepts throughout each lesson, but of course, you should bookmark (and feel free to use!) the Akka.NET docs.
This course expects the following:
Petabridge is a company dedicated to making it easier for .NET developers to build distributed applications.
Petabridge also offers Akka.NET consulting and training - so please sign up for our mailing list!
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