Cloud Akka: Where is Microsoft Azure?
Over the last time period Microsoft has been working on Visual Studio Async CTP, providing amongst other things TPL Dataflow:
TPL Dataflow (TDF) is a new .NET library for building concurrent applications. It promotes actor/agent-oriented designs through primitives for in-process message passing, dataflow, and pipelining. TDF builds upon the APIs and scheduling infrastructure provided by the Task Parallel Library (TPL) in .NET 4, and integrates with the language support for asynchrony provided by C#, Visual Basic, and F#.
I, with a number of other colleague have build some interesting applications on top of TPL Dataflow. However what is clear is that Microsoft is still someway behind the curve on infrastructure to support distributed actor/agent-oriented applications – Cloudy Akka highlights this. If you look at Jonas’s recent posting around Ping Pong you can see that Cloudy Akka leverages Apache ZooKeeper to offer a very interesting scalable solution for trading applications.
Back in the Microsoft world, I just don’t see anything on the horizon to aid me in moving the Stat Arb ETF agent-actor application into Windows Azure. Does this mean that yet again post the MTS/COM+ era that Microsoft is still thinking in terms of retail consumers, client applications, and not the wide enterprise solutions that some of us have to build?
