This morning while reviewing sample code I ran across the collection activities.  Working with these activities is fairly straightforward but there are some issues that you should be aware of that can impact the behavior of your workflow. These issues...

“The important point is that our test can’t control what that dependency returns to our code under test or how it behaves (if we wanted to simulate an exception, for example). That’s when we use stubs .” – The Art of Unit...

In my previous previous post on the WCF Fault Spike and the other post on 4 Tenets of Service Oriented Data Validation I discussed some options and best practices for service data validation with WCF.  In this post I want to consider how the same...

Remember the 4 tenets of SOA?  One of them is that Boundaries are explicit.  When somebody sends data to your service it is just like when you cross an international border into another country.  Just a couple of hours drive north of us...

Ready to have some fun… Today I spent the day investigating WCF FaulContracts and FaultException and some best practices for argument validation.  I’m going to do the same in a future post on Workflow Services but I felt it best to really understand...

This morning I’ve been working on how to support cancelling a workflow via a CancellationToken.  The details of that are not important right now but what is really cool is how I was able to test this. Scenario: Caller requests Cancellation via a...

With the work I’ve been doing on versioning I’ve had to write unit tests that verify the behavior I expect from the helper classes in Microsoft.Activities.dll .  If you want to verify that your assembly versioning strategy is working correctly you...

Never assume anything, test everything All these years I assumed that Assembly.Load() would respect version numbers if specified in the FullName string.   As I’ve been adding more test coverage to Microsoft.Activities I found that Assembly.Load...

In my previous post , I’ve been exploring how changing the version of an ActivityLibrary affects a workflow.  In this post I want to explore how Workflow Services behave. The good news – as far as I can tell, they behave exactly as they should behave...

In my last post I showed you how the _XamlStaticHelper class uses different semantics when loading assemblies referenced by XAML files. Today I’m going to show you a solution I’ve built into the Microsoft.Activities library that can help you apply standard...

In agile software development , a spike is a story that cannot be estimated until a development team runs a timebox ed investigation. The output of a spike story is an estimate for the original story. - SearchSoftwareQuality.com Definitions Update 1/8...

Our team is busily working on some great new stuff to bring first class support for Workflow to Windows Azure.  We want to hear from you so we can be sure to deliver on what you need. Drop me a line if you want to chat and you Have workflow (WF3...

I couldn't leave this one alone. While I was making the last episode I said that there was possibly another strategy for detecting states and transitions and that was to use Tracking data. In this episode I'll show you a better way to implement our WPF...