In this post I’ll show how you can easily use appropriate icons within the Workflow Designer toolbox. There are a number of posts out on the web that show varying ways to do this, however the method I’m proposing is most probably the easiest...

I’m with a customer in the labs this week doing some performance work and one of the tasks we wanted to do was to programmatically read the load test database in order to retrieve a table of summary data from a test run. My customer has instrumented their...

I've just come across a problem with load testing on Visual Studio 2010 (which probably amounts to a RTFM issue, but who does that anyway?) When installing the load test controller I specified the machine name as '.'. Nothing in the setup told me this...

A.K.A. “Why won’t the workflow designer use my data template?” I was on site with a customer today writing some custom activities and found a problem that wasn’t immediately obvious how I could get around it (and indeed it’s taken me some hours of head...

I’m in the scalability labs with a customer this week and we’ve encountered an exception when setting up a goal based load test. We have a bunch of machines, and my customer has created a set of custom performance counters that report appropriate data...

I’m in a curious time-warp this week, as I’ve just been asked how to do something in WF4 that I wrote about for WF3 in September 2005 . Anyhow, a customer of mine asked how to add an item to the context menu for an activity within the design surface,...

I’ve been using MVVM since I started WPF (I was a latecomer to the beauty that is WPF) and one of the things that’s always irked me is the amount of code you need to write in order to expose a command. I’ll typically write something like the following...

Now that the State Machine Activity Pack has been released on Codeplex (see http://wf.codeplex.com for details) I thought I should resurrect one of the samples I regularly used in the 3.x days to show a state machine example. The point of this example...

This blog post will show you how you can add a custom tool to the toolbox which, when selected, will drop a custom activity onto the designer surface. In addition I’ll also show how to get non-activity classes onto the toolbox. There are many times when...

When writing a custom activity you’ll typically want to provide a custom designer which is used when rendering your activity on the design surface. Visual Studio will look for designers using a couple of methods – one old, one new. In this post I’ll show...

I was onsite today with a customer who was having problems getting WCF to work, and after much wailing and gnashing we finally arrived at a solution so I thought I would blog it. We were getting an EndpointNotFoundException with the error message “There...

Sorry for the awful pun, but now you’re probably thinking I’m mad, either that or you now have the lyrics of “How much is that doggy in the window” racing around in your head. Anyhow, the point of this post is to show something that I’ve carped on about...

I was writing a helper class today for WPF and had a IsDirty flag which was firing a PropertyChanged event. However, when I used this in my UI the element that was bound to this flag was not updating. After a quick look through my code I noticed the following...

[Note – this article is based on Workflow 4 Beta 1, some things will change for Beta 2] First off let me apologise for the length of this post. If you just want the code, skip to the bottom. I don’t know about you but some words just don’t seem to make...

The very first talk I gave on .NET was on custom attributes – some time way back in late 2000 or early 2001. At the time I was espousing the benefits of using custom attributes to add on details of unit tests and bug fixes. There have been many additions...

Polymorphism in any OO language is taken as a given – and people would be shouting about it a lot if a language didn’t support it. However, when you’re writing a service interface with WCF you might also want to permit some form of polymorphic behaviour...

I’ve had a rather frustrating afternoon but it’s all sorted now. I’ve recently repaved my laptop with Windows 7 RC and installed loads of stuff at the same time, including VS2010 Beta 1. I’ve also more recently installed VS2008 as I needed it for the...

If you’re running in a terminal services environment, or have multiple instances of a given application running on your machine, this tip will help you to work out which process is which in Perfmon. To see the issue, I’ve created a simple Windows Forms...

I was doing some investigation on a customer site and needed to use adplus.vbs to take process dumps, however I was forever getting the above error and couldn’t for a while work it out. I thought I must have typed in the wrong process id, but after checking...

I’ve been running WHS since an internal beta on a box that really wasn’t quite what I wanted – in that it was way too large. As far as I’m concerned a home server should be a small appliance that sits on your network, is on all the time, and consumes...

If you develop .NET client applications that are deployed to users over Terminal Services (TS) or Citrix then this is the post for you. Why? – well, there’s a bit of an issue that not a lot of people know about, and it can really ruin your day. First...

I’ve been invited to do a session in Coventry for the NxtGenUG – this will be run on Monday June 15th at the Coventry flying club. If you fancy knowing some more about the new stuff in Workflow then please sign up here . I’ll cover a lot of detail on...

In my role as an ADC I often get to run customer labs – this is where we take a customers application, install it on the hardware we have in Reading, and then exercise a number of load tests against it to see what opportunities there are for performance...

Frequently in my role I see code that is doing something like the following :- After Time (x) Do (y). Repeat ad infinitum. No user interface. I’ve deliberately put this in nothing approximating code as that’s what this article...

Frequently you need to add in some form of logging in your code on method entry and exit points, and typically this is done in a way which over-burdens you (the developer) with a fair bit of extra code. Now, the universal panacea would be to be able to...