Microsoft Orleans, a .NET framework for building scalable distributed cloud applications, has been updated for .NET 7 and released as Orleans 7.0.0 on November 8th, 2022. The improvements in this release include better performance, simplified development dependencies, and a simplified identification schema for the grains, a unit of execution in Orleans.
Orleans started in 2010 as a project inside Microsoft Research around virtual actors, an abstraction over the actor model of computation. It was then used as the technology of choice for building the Microsoft Azure back-end for the popular game franchise Halo. The core technology behind Orleans was transferred to 343 Industries, a Microsoft Xbox Game Studios subsidiary, and it was made available as an open-source project on GitHub in 2015. Another actor-based programming framework, comparable to Orleans, is Akka.
