Akka.NET v1.2 Production Release

[Aaronontheweb]

1.2.0 April 11 2017

Feature Release for Akka.NET
Akka.NET 1.2 is a major feature release that introduces the following major changes:

Akka.Remote now uses DotNetty for its transport layer
The biggest change for 1.2 is the removal of Helios 2.0 as the default transport and the introduction of DotNetty. The new DotNetty transport is fully backwards compatible with the Helios 1.4 and 2.* transports, so you should be able to upgrade from any Akka.NET 1.* application to 1.2 without any downtime. All of the helios.tcp HOCON is also supported by the DotNetty transport, so none of that needs to updated for the DotNetty transport to work out of the box.

In addition, the DotNetty transport supports TLS, which can be enabled via the following HOCON:

akka {
  loglevel = DEBUG
  actor {
    provider = Akka.Remote.RemoteActorRefProvider,Akka.Remote
  }
  remote {
    dot-netty.tcp {
      port = 0
      hostname = 127.0.0.1
      enable-ssl = true
      log-transport = true
      ssl {
        suppress-validation = true
        certificate {
          # valid ssl certificate must be installed on both hosts
          path = "<valid certificate path>" 
          password = "<certificate password>"
          # flags is optional: defaults to "default-flag-set" key storage flag
          # other available storage flags:
          #   exportable | machine-key-set | persist-key-set | user-key-set | user-protected
          flags = [ "default-flag-set" ] 
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

You can read more about Akka.Remote's TLS support here.

See the complete DotNetty transport HOCON here.

Akka.Streams and Akka.Cluster.Tools RTMed
Akka.Streams and Akka.Cluster.Tools have graduated from beta status to stable modules and their interfaces are now considered to be stable.

CoordinatedShutdown
One of the major improvements in Akka.NET 1.2 is the addition of the new CoordinatedShutdown plugin, which is designed to make it easier for nodes that are running Akka.Cluster to automatically exit a cluster gracefully whenever ActorSystem.Terminate is called or when the process the node is running in attempts to exit. CoordinatedShutdown is fully extensible and can be used to schedule custom shutdown operations as part of ActorSystem termination.

You can read more about how to use CoordinatedShutdown here.

Additional Changes
In addition to the above changes, there have been a large number of performance improvements, bug fixes, and documentation improvements made to Akka.NET in 1.2. Read the full list of changes in Akka.NET 1.2 here.

COMMITS	LOC+	LOC-	AUTHOR
17	4840	4460	Alex Valuyskiy
16	4046	1144	Aaron Stannard
12	8591	2984	Sean Gilliam
6	971	1300	Sergey
5	6787	2073	Bartosz Sypytkowski
4	6461	8403	Arjen Smits
4	333	125	ravengerUA
3	71	65	Marc Piechura
3	300	24	Nick Chamberlain
2	79	40	Maxim Salamatko
2	305	20	Ismael Hamed
1	136	12	Sergey Kostrukov
1	1015	45	Lukas Rieger
1	1	0	siudeks

[Aaronontheweb]

(FYI for other contributors, definitely don't "squash and merge" this. Use a merge commit)