Sydney: CCR Thoughts
Whilst in Sydney I was asked an interesting question about my usage of the CCR. So let me start by first highlighting Angel “Java” Lopez blog which has a few postings on the CCR: AjMessages, Distributed Agents using DSS/VPL and Agents.
Before I go any further the below is something I should have blogged a year or so ago.
One of the interesting components in the CCR space is the DSS, since in todays world we want parallel processing where possible, and we want distribution over the n servers we have available. If you look at the GPars postings I made recently you’ll see that GPars offers distrbution of agents – almost a base requiremet for any actor/agent framework these days.
So what have I been using the CCR for? Firstly there are a few public cases of enterprises using CCR in production, unfortunately as is often the case the coolest stuff is under NDA 
From a financial trading systems perspective transaction flow routing and processing are areas that the CCR has been successful in. The CCR work I have been involved in started out a few years back – don’t forget the CCR has been out for a while.
Some of the CCR work was centred around Single Dealer Platforms (SDP), specifically looking at routing and processing of meesages coming from the Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and processing user requests. As examples, think about the primary sequence flows that are involved in a simplistic SDP: user logon, request for RFQ/RFS, view orders, view blotter. Ports and Arbiters can help to facilitate the processing of these messages, coupled with the async nature of streaming servers and message bus’s. I’ll try and dig up some of the old code and blog it soon.
Obviously the CCR work I undertook was sometime ago and has been superseeded by Axum. Unfortunately we’ll still waiting for Microsoft to decide on what its going to do with Axum so we’re still stuck in the CCR/AsyncEnumerator world today, and obviously most of us live in Rx land these days.
Might want to take a look at the RX framework. It can do what the CCR does. You can wrap the RX framework and make it look lkek the CCR as well. I believe this is where MS is going.