Why should I learn about Orleans?

When we plan to learn about or use a new technology, it is quite natural to compare it with other similar technologies. Orleans is often compared with Akka.NET and Erlang actors. Microsoft Orleans, with its design choices, is an actor implementation, termed a virtual actor. The trade-off design choices made, as we learned in the previous section, will ease the developer's effort in building distributed applications. In addition to this, the most important thing to note is Orleans embraces the well-known object-oriented programming model. Orleans is often termed distributed .NET as it extends familiar .NET concepts such as objects, interfaces, async/await, and try/catch and extends them to distributed context. For object-oriented programmers, the learning curve is smooth with Orleans when compared with other distributed application development frameworks.

Orleans provides a programming paradigm that smoothly blends non-distributed techniques...