Why?

I wanted to play with Proto.Actor a little bit. By default it uses Protocol Buffers for serialization. Protocol.Buffers are powerful and fast, they are not experimentation friendly, though.

Problems:

• I already had messages annotated with Newtonsoft.Json attributes
• I wanted to pass messages I got on REST API straight to actors

Of course, Smuggler is much slower than Protocol Buffer native messages, but allows to prototype fast.

Plug-in serializer implementation

// register protobuf descriptor
Smuggler.Descriptors.ForEach(Serialization.RegisterFileDescriptor);

// setup serializer (your custom implementation)
Smuggler.Use(
    message => ToByteArray(message),
    bytes => FromByteArray(bytes)
)

Newtonsoft adapter included

Proto.Smuggler includes Nwwtonsoft adapter:

Smuggler.Use(new JsonSmuggler(new JsonSerializerSettings { TypeNameHandling = TypeNameHandling.Auto }));

so you can can easily smuggle all messages which are serializable with Newtonsoft.Jsom.

Smuggling

Smuggler is very simplistic and rather for prototyping so you need to explicilty use in you actors. When you was to serialize message use: Smuggler.Conceal(message). To deserialize use Smuggler.Reveal(message).