• Graceful shutdown of a silo with deactivation of all grains hosted in it.
• Support for Dependency Injection and better testability of grains:
  • Direct instantiation of grains with passing IGrainIdentity and IGrainRuntime to constructor.
  • IGrainRuntime is a mockable interface that includes a set of system service interfaces, also mockable.
  • GrainFactory is a non-static class that is accessed via base.GrainFactory from within a grain and via GrainClient.GrainFactory on the client.
• Deprecated generated per-interface GetGrain static factory methods.
• Added support for concrete grain state classes, deprecated grain state interfaces and code generation of grain classes.
• Removed Read/Write/ClearStateAsync methods from IGrainState and moved them to Grain<T>.
• Performance optimizations of messaging with up to 40% improvements in throughput.
• Added ZooKeeper based cluster membership storage option.
• Removed compile time dependency on Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime.dll.
• Consolidated dependencies on Azure in OrleansAzureUtils.dll, which is now optional.
• Refactored SQL system store to be more robust and vendor agnostic.
• Added streaming event deliver policy and failure reporting.
• Changed VS project templates to use only NuGet packages and not the SDK.
• Removed binaries and local silo environment from the SDK.
• Numerous bug fixes and other improvements.