Introducing the Satellite Pattern for Orleans
Microsoft Orleans implements a Virtual Actor Model with what it calls Grains, and as a result, it is important for developers interacting with grains to not consider their lifecycle. That is, a grain shouldn’t be seen as created, activated, deactivated, or deleted. It is expect that the grain will exist when you need it. When modelling application state as a function of aggregate grain state, it is important not to expose grain lifecycle events as part of that aggregate. The most common example is a platform by which users are represented by one or more grains and may become “online” or “offline”. This article describes a pattern in which such state is maintained in a secondary system to be consumed or communicated outward, hereby described as the Satellite Pattern.
A Simple Orleans Implicit Stream Example
While exploring Microsoft Orleans for potential use in developing a CQRS & Event Sourced application, I was delighted to see Implicit Streams being supported as a method for propagating Events to Grains. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, the documentation is a little lacking in how to properly setup Implicit Streaming. Fortunately, there are […]
Building an Offline Indicator in Blazor
If you’re building a Progressive Web Application (PWA), chances are you’ll want to show the Online/Offline status of the browser to help keep the user informed. Fortunately, there is an incredibly simple Browser API for accessing this data! This article discusses how we’ll integrate the javascript API into a simple Blazor component. This article assumes […]
Method for Dependency Injected HttpClient Service Access
The inevitability of most Blazor applications is the use of HttpClient to reach out to API endpoints. Many times, these endpoints are contained within the solution, but they may be external as well. Without much effort, this necessity quickly turns into a rats nest of initialization code in razor code with hardcoded strings for each […]
Petl: Developer Friendly, Testable View Storage in Sitecore
As the timescale for Sitecore’s built-in indexing reached multitudes of hours rather than minutes, it was time to come up with a new solution. We still needed some of what SOLR was providing in terms of searching by term, but only for back office processes. For the storefront, we were using SOLR more as a […]