[craigsmitham]

TPL DataFlow is great for orchestrating concurrent computation in individual apps. Orleans is designed to be an application programming framework for the cloud - distributed, fault tolerant, and scalable. Personally, I like how Akka (JVM) builds on top of its actor model to provide dataflow programming. Orleans is not a primitive actor framework like Akka - it does the hard clustering and fault handling for you. Orleans is not a trivial library and introduces a number of constraints on an architecture that leverages it. That being said, it makes getting started much easier, depending on your goal. What is really nice about Orleans, is that the programming model exposed to the programmer is still just the TPL async/await goodness.