Dev Tinker

Originally published on Dev-Tinker | Reading time: 10 minutes | Part 2 of 16 in the Complete Akka.NET Series Part 1 - What is the Actor Model? A Complete Guide for C# Developers Build a Calculator That Never Blocks Your UI Thread In Week 1, we discovered how the Actor Model solves traditional concurrency nightmares. Now it's time to get your hands dirty and build something practical. Today, we're creating a sophisticated calculator actor that demonstrates professional actor design patterns, proper message handling, and robust error management. Why a calculator? Because it's simple enough to understand quickly , yet complex enough to showcase real-world patterns you'll use in production systems. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have a calculator that can handle multiple operations simultaneously, never crashes from division by zero, and maintains perfect operation history—all without a single lock or shared mutable state. This isn't just another ...

If you're new to C# programming, you've probably wondered: "When should I use a class, record, or struct?" This comprehensive guide will explain everything you need to know about these three fundamental types in C#, plus show you the amazing world of pattern matching with switch statements. What Are These Types Anyway? Think of C# types as different containers for your data and behavior: Class : Like a blueprint for complex objects (houses, cars, people) Record : Like a form with pre-filled information (student records, invoices) Struct : Like a simple container for basic data (coordinates, colors) Understanding the Basics What is a Class? A class is a reference type that lives on the heap. It's perfect for complex objects that need to change over time and can inherit from other classes. public class Person { public string FirstName { get; set; } public string LastName { get; set; } public int Age { get; set; } public Person(...

Originally published on Dev-Tinker | Reading time: 8 minutes | Part 1 of 16 in the Complete Akka.NET Series Why Your Multi-Threaded C# Applications Crash Picture this: You're building a high-traffic e-commerce application in C#. Multiple users are simultaneously updating their shopping carts, processing payments, and checking inventory. You've carefully implemented locks, used ConcurrentDictionary , and sprinkled async/await throughout your code. Yet somehow, your application still experiences mysterious deadlocks during peak traffic, race conditions that corrupt data, and threading bugs that only appear in production. Sound familiar? You're not alone. Traditional multi-threaded programming is inherently complex and error-prone , even for experienced developers. But what if I told you there's a fundamentally different approach that eliminates these problems entirely? Welcome to the Actor Model – a mathematical model of concurrent computation that's been qu...