In keeping with its plans to open source much of its .NET development platform, Microsoft has announced that it plans to release its Orleans programming model under an open source license. Microsoft’s Halo development teams have been using Orleans in conjunction with its Azure cloud computing platform for several years, and the company released a public preview of Orleans at its build conference earlier this year.
“Now we decided to take the next logical step, and do the thing many of you have been asking for – to open-source ‘Orleans,'” said the Orleans team. “The preparation work has already commenced, and we expect to be ready in early 2015.”
Microsoft explains that Orleans “offers a simple programming model build around grains, a unit of computation with private and shared state that communicates exclusively by sending messages to other grains and receiving and replying to requests from clients. Combine with the Orleans runtime, which provides functionality commonly used in this type of system, Orleans raises the level of abstraction and helps developers build scalable correct Cloud applications.”
