WPF - Actor Model as a Model layer for MVVM

A little while ago, we received some very interesting feedback from one of our DevExpress MVPs, Mikhail Shubin, who had created an Actor-based implementation of a model layer with a WPF MVVM application. I have been interested in Actor models for a long time, so I thought this was pretty exciting. We decided to publish his demo as a knowledge base article, so others can benefit from it.

To give you some background, the Actor Model (follow the link for a detailed explanation on Wikipedia) is a pattern that helps create loosely coupled entities called Actors which execute concurrently and can be deployed in distributed systems. Actors use message passing to communicate, and actors as well as messages are very light-weight so that very large numbers of both can be handled by typical implementations. Actors usually form fault-tolerant logical systems where they are organized hierarchically, with parents being responsible for the supervision of their children. Erlang is a platform that became famous for its Actor Model support, and Scala also offers it as a standard API. For .NET there are several library based implementations and Mikhail chose Proto.Actor for his application.

Without further ado, here is the KB article that shows some technical examples and includes a demo application: KB Article T630656

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