Working with actors and the TPL Dataflow Library

With Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, we were given the Task Parallel Library (TPL), which allowed us to process a known set of data or operations over multiple threads using constructs such as the Parallel.For loop.

Coinciding with the release of Visual Studio 2012, Microsoft has now given us the ability to take any data we like and process it in chunks through a series of steps, where each step can be processed independent of the others. This library is called the TPL Dataflow Library.

An interesting thing to note about this library is that it was originally included as part of .NET Framework in the pre-release versions, but the team moved it to a NuGet distribution model so that changes and updates to the package could be made outside of the normal .NET life cycle. A similar approach has been taken with the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) for web and Windows Store apps. This change to the distribution model shows a willingness from...