Akka.NET is an open-source actor model framework written exclusively for Microsoft.NET in C# and compatible with .NET Core. It simplifies the building of scalable, concurrent, high-throughput, and low-latency systems, making life for software developers a bit easier. Zoran Maksimovic's Akka.NET Succinctly will show readers what an actor model is and how to work with actors in Akka.NET, taking them from an actor's lifecycle through to unit testing.

In this episode, Aaron Stannard (@Aaronontheweb) comes on to talk about his open source project, Akka.NET. This is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault tolerant event-driven applications on .NET and Mono. 

In the same time when first object-oriented languages were emerging, another concept inspired by general relativity and quantum mechanics was taking shape – actor model. In general terms, the Actor model was defined 1973. and was developed on a platform of multiple independent processors in a network. Similar to the object-oriented approach, this essentially mathematical model, revolved around the concept of actors. An actor is the smallest structural unit of Actor model, and just like objects, they encapsulate data and behavior. In difference to objects, however, actors communicate with each other exclusively trough messages. Messages in actors are processed in a serial manner. According to the full definition of actors, they can do three things:

• send a finite number of messages to other actors
  
• create a finite number of new actors
  
• designate the behavior to be used for the next message it receives