What is Microsoft Orleans?
Microsoft Orleans is the database and business logic layer for your app. It's extremely fast, highly scalable and super cheap to run as you can use Azure Table Storage to store your data (which costs peanuts) all while making software development simpler using something called the Actor model. You can mostly forget about having to write boilerplate code to retrieve and store data from the database, Microsoft Orleans takes care of that for you.
Optional Feature Selection
The Microsoft Orleans project template uses dotnet new to enable you to turn features of the project template on or off. Find out more about dotnet new here.
Project
- Title - The name of the project which determines the assembly product name.
- Description - A description of the project which determines the assembly description.
- Author - The name of the author of the project which determines the assembly author and copyright information.
- EditorConfig - Add a .editorconfig file to set a fixed code style.
- Git - Add a .gitignore file to stop Git from checking in temporary files and a .gitattributes to use git LFS.
- ReadMe - Add a README.md markdown file describing the project.
- TreatWarningsAsErrors - Treat warnings as errors.
Security
- TLS (Default=Off) - Adds TLS transport encryption to secure communication between the client and server.
Analytics
- HealthCheck (Default=On) - A health-check endpoint that returns the status of this API and its dependencies, giving an indication of its health.
- Analytics - Monitor internal information about how your application is running, as well as external user information.
- Application Insights - Monitor internal information about how your application is running, as well as external user information using the Microsoft Azure cloud.
- None (Default) - Not using any analytics.
- ApplicationInsightsKey - Your Application Insights instrumentation key e.g. 11111111-2222-3333-4444-555555555555.
Always On Features
Logging
- Serilog - Has Serilog built in for an excellent structured logging experience.
Dashboard
- Dashboard - A dashboard showing Grain statistics.
How can I get it?
- Install the latest .NET Core SDK.
- Run
dotnet new --install Boxed.Templatesto install the project template. - Run
dotnet new orleans --helpto see how to select the feature of the project. - Run
dotnet new orleans --name "MyProject"along with any other custom options to create a project from the template.
Release Notes and To-Do List
You can find release notes for each version here and a To-Do list of new features and enhancements coming soon in the projects tab.
Contributing
Please view the Contributing guide for more information.

