Azure Service Fabric: Activate an actor on startup

I’m currently working on a project where we are using Azure Service Fabric and the reliable actors component. We had a situation where we wanted to create and activate a set of actors the moment the actor service is started. In our first attempt we added this logic inside the program.cs:

	internal static class Program
	{
	/// <summary>
	/// This is the entry point of the service host process.
	/// </summary>
	private static void Main()
	{
	try
	{
	// This line registers an Actor Service to host your actor class with the Service Fabric runtime.
	// The contents of your ServiceManifest.xml and ApplicationManifest.xml files
	// are automatically populated when you build this project.
	// For more information, see http://aka.ms/servicefabricactorsplatform
	ActorRuntime.RegisterActorAsync<BillingActor>(
	(context, actorType) => new ActorService(context, actorType)).GetAwaiter().GetResult();
	//Don't do this!!!
	var proxy = ActorProxy.Create<IMyActor>(new ActorId(0));
	Thread.Sleep(Timeout.Infinite);
	}
	catch (Exception e)
	{
	ActorEventSource.Current.ActorHostInitializationFailed(e.ToString());
	throw;
	}
	}
	}

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This is actually a bad idea as we are not taking the actor service lifecycle into account. The correct place to activate our actors is inside the RunAsync method of our actor service:

	public class SampleActorService : ActorService
	{
	public SampleActorService(StatefulServiceContext context, ActorTypeInformation actorTypeInfo, Func<ActorBase> actorFactory = null, IActorStateProvider stateProvider = null, ActorServiceSettings settings = null)
	: base(context, actorTypeInfo, actorFactory, stateProvider, settings)
	{
	}
	// Just make sure that actor method is idempotent, because this will execute every time the primary replica
	// of your actor service is started up (after failover, resource balancing, application upgrade, etc), but the nice thing
	// is it won't execute before your actor service is ready and it will always execute when the service comes up.
	// see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36729732/service-fabric-spawn-actor-on-startup
	protected override async Task RunAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
	{
	await base.RunAsync(cancellationToken);
	//Activate your actors here:
	var proxy1 = ActorProxy.Create<IMyActor>(new ActorId(0));
	var proxy2 = ActorProxy.Create<IMyActor>(new ActorId(1));
	}
	}

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