In addition to Akka.NET joining the .NET Foundation and announcing our participation in the .NET Foundation Summer Hackfest, we had two more major Akka.NET developments to announce on Friday:

• Akka.NET v1.3, which adds .NET Standard support to Akka.NET, is released and now available on NuGet and
• The official Akka.NET website has been totally redone in DocFx in order to make it more readable, user-friendly, and well-organized.

Akka.NET v1.3 has been a work in progress since .NET Core was first released last year and is the culmination of hundreds of commits by dozens of contributors. You can read the official Akka.NET v1.3 release notes here, but what follows are my notes on some of the changes end-users can expect when adopting v1.3 and upgrading from earlier versions of Akka.NET.

.NET Standard 1.6 Support for Akka.NET

The most-requested feature for Akka.NET over the past year has been .NET Standard / .NET Core support.

In case you’re not sure what the difference is between .NET Standard and .NET Core: .NET Standard is a compilation target shared by both the full .NET framework (4.6.*) and .NET Core. Any library that targets .NET Standard 1.6, for instance, can be used inside .NET 4.6.1 AND .NET Core 1.1 applications. You can read more about .NET Standard and the various versions of it here at Microsoft’s official documentation.

Akka.NET’s NuGet packages now target both .NET 4.5 (which we always have, historically) and .NET Standard 1.6. NuGet will automatically install the .NET Standard 1.6 version of the NuGet package if you’re targeting .NET 4.6.1 or .NET Core.

We’ve already been using the Akka.NET v1.3 nightly builds in a new production-facing project and the results have been excellent thus far and we look forward...

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It’s our pleasure to announce that as of today, Akka.NET is officially part of the .NET Foundation! Akka.NET is joining an elite group of projects such as Roslyn, NuGet, .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, and others.

What Does This Mean for Akka.NET?

Open source foundations have been a mainstay of OSS projects across many different platforms for years; ultimately what they provide to OSS projects are legal support, marketing help, and general project guidance. This includes things like protecting the project’s copyrights, ensuring that its intellectual property is in good standing and is properly assigned, etc.

In general the goal of the .NET Foundation is to help ensure that all of its projects follow OSS best practices in order to increase adoption of OSS across the entire .NET ecosystem.

Akka.NET already has major users such as Bank of America, SNL Financial, Schneider Electric, Boeing, and others. And the rate at which Akka.NET is being installed and deployed into production is increasing all the time. We’re joining the .NET Foundation in order to help broaden the tent of Akka.NET users and send a signal to potential users everywhere that Akka.NET is in it for the long haul and that our project is enterprise-friendly.

The core development team behind Akka.NET will continue to do what they’ve been doing; our roadmap and our priorities are driven by achieving parity with our partners at Lightbend and the Scala implementation of Akka and by the demands of our users. Joining the .NET Foundation will enable us to focus on our code, samples, and documentation while it helps us keep the project’s IP and community standards in good hands.

Announcing the Akka.NET Contrib Organization and the 2017 .NET Foundation Summer Hackfest

One other big change we wish to...

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Petabridge has been working with Akka.NET users since January, 2015 and one of the biggest gaps in the Akka.NET ecosystem thus far has been adequate tooling for deployment, monitoring, and management of Akka.NET applications. This has been especially true for users who are building sophisticated, high-performance distributed systems using Akka.Cluster.

Today we’re pleased to announce the release of the first one of our tools for this purpose: Petabridge.Cmd - a command-line interface for managing Akka.NET applications in production.

Petabridge.Cmd Features

So what can Petabridge.Cmd do? Out of the box, it supports the following:

1. Akka.Cluster management - view the status of the cluster, down nodes, trigger nodes to leave the cluster gracefully, and have new nodes join an existing cluster;
2. Akka.NET log management - perform a live tail of logs from a given node, view historical logs, manually append log messages, and more;
3. Akka.NET actor hierarchy visualization - perform a live trace of the current actor hierarchy, including ones on remote machines;
4. System information - view data about the uptime of the current node and etc;
5. Ability to define custom, application-specific management commands, which can be automatically downloaded from the Petabridge.Cmd.Host server to the pbm client with no code updates necessary; and
6. Tab-autocomplete, help information, command memorization, argument hints, and a two-line installation process.

Petabridge.Cmd provides an out of the box experience that is designed to give most Akka.NET users 80% of what they need right out of the gate.

Installation

Petabridge.Cmd ships as two component parts which work together:

1. The pbm client, which can be installed via Chocolatey - a package manager for Windows and
2. The Petabridge.Cmd.Host, which is installed to your Akka.NET application via...

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