ASP.NET

Creating the Akka.NET resources

Hosting inside an ASP.NET application is easy. The Global.asax would be the designated place to start.

public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication
{
    protected static ActorSystem ActorSystem;
    //here you would store your toplevel actor-refs
    protected static IActorRef MyActor;

    protected void Application_Start()
    {
        //your mvc config. Does not really matter if you initialise
        //your actor system before or after

        ActorSystem = ActorSystem.Create("app");
        //here you would register your toplevel actors
        MyActor = ActorSystem.ActorOf<MyActor>();
    }
}

As you can see the main point here is keeping a static reference to your ActorSystem . This ensures it won't be accidentally garbage collected and gets disposed and created with the start and stop events of your web application.

Warning
Although hosting inside an ASP.NET Application is easy. A word of caution: When you are hosting inside of IIS the applicationpool your app lives in could be stopped and started at the whim of IIS. This in turn means your ActorSystem could be stopped at any given time.

Typically you use a very lightweight ActorSystem inside ASP.NET applications, and offload heavy-duty work to a seperate Windows Service via Akka.Remote / Akka.Cluster

Interaction between Controllers and Akka.NET

In the sample below, we use an Web API Controller:

public class SomeController  : ApiController
{
      //expose your endpoint as async
      public async Task<SomeResult> Post(SomeRequest someRequest)
      {
           //send a message based on your incoming arguments to one of the actors you created earlier
           //and await the result by sending the message to `Ask`
           var result = await MvcApplication.MyActor.Ask<SomeResult>(new SomeMessage(someRequest.SomeArg1,someRequest.SomeArg2));
           return result;
      }
}