A few months ago I wrote this post about my diagnosis with Adiposis Dolorosa (Dercum's Disease) . After writing it I had a brief reprieve from the symptoms and for a while I was able to work part time. Then in September I had surgery to remove some of...

I’ll never forget the first time I heard someone mention a “Race Condition”.  In my younger years when I was more worried about what people thought of me I was to embarrassed to admit that I didn’t really know what they were talking about. ...

I am a musician. Over the years I have played keyboards in many bands, traveling and performing mostly as a hobby. I’ll never forget what one of my mentors taught me. He said “The rest is just as important as the note” The rest is the part of the song...

Question Can I use a LINQ Query such as the following in a Workflow? private static void ShowQueryWithCode(IEnumerable< string > names) { Console.WriteLine( "Linq Query in Code - show names that start with 'R'" ); // Assuming there are...

Here is the challenge.  Create a portable library that could be used by almost anything including Console Apps, Windows Phone, ASP.NET, Xbox 360 Make it data binding friendly for targets like WPF, Silverlight and Windows 8 XAML Metro Apps by supporting...

There are a few development tools that I just can’t live without. ReSharper A few years ago I was sitting in Glenn Block’s office when I noticed some strange additions to Visual Studio.  When I asked him about it he said “That’s ReSharper” and I...

Nearly every day I get email from someone asking for help.  I wish I had time to answer every question.  I used to answer more of them but recently I was diagnosed with Adiposis Dolorosa. Adiposis dolorosa , or Dercum disease, is a rare condition...

Developers often say that there is a steep learning curve with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4).  I won’t deny that… instead, allow me to share three simple rules that will help you to get over that curve sooner and to make them easy to remember...

Recently saw this question in the MSDN Workflow Forum Is there a (SetState) in the new StateMachine Activity? Many users of Workflow in .NET 3.5 took advantage of the StateMachineWorkflowInstance class to determine what state a workflow is in, and also...

One thing that many web sites do is to verify email addresses by sending you an email to complete registration.  I decided to build a Registration system for ASP.NET MVC using Windows Workflow Foundation. When you create a new ASP.NET MVC web site...

Sometimes you have a workflow service that is misbehaving in a production environment.  How do you figure out what is going on when you can’t attach a debugger? The solution is to use Workflow Tracking.  There are two alternatives you can try...

Try this… Create a new ASP.NET Web Application (MVC or Web Forms).  Then add a new a WCF Workflow Service to your web project. Now try to add a service reference to your workflow service.  It fails with an error. There was an error downloading...

In my previous posts I’ve written about my experiences with WorkflowServices and Silverlight. Troubleshooting Workflow Services / Silverlight Using Workflow Services and Silverlight Together WorkflowServices, CanCreateInstance and Silverlight Problem...

I was doing some work on my Contoso HR Workflow Services sample application today when for some strange reason things were not working at all.  I found that when I tried to send a message to the Workflow Service from the ASP.NET code I got this exception...

If you install the Visual Studio 11 Preview release on a machine that has .NET 4 Platform Update 1 installed you will find that projects targeting .NET 4 Platform Update 1 will fail to build properly.  The error you will get is 'System.Activities...

If you need a quick and simple way to manually test your WorkflowService the WCF Test Client makes it simple but there are a few tips that will make your life much easier. Tip: Add the WCF Test Client to your Visual Studio Tools menu Select Tools / External...

From time to time I’ll hear from somebody who is trying to use a WCF Workflow Service with Silverlight as the client and they are getting this exception. System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException was unhandled by user code Message=An error occurred while...

If you are using Microsoft.Activities.UnitTesting.XamlInjector to mock activities you may run into an error like this. Test method XamlInjectorRepro.Test.UnitTest1.TestMethod1 threw exception: System.Xaml.XamlObjectWriterException: Cannot create unknown...

The Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) - Custom Activity Designer sample demonstrates how you can build an activity and activity designer.  It includes three projects MyActivityLibrary - The activity library project MyActivityLibrary.Design - The...

Today I’ve been fixing up the build system for Microsoft.Activities and Microsoft.Activities.UnitTesting.  Over time I’ve been using a combination of strange tools and batch files to build things but it became such a mess I decided to take the time...

You know those little tools you build to help in your development?  The ones that you slapped together in a hurry and might not work all the time but you put up with them because you don’t want to take the time to fix them?  Well CleanProject...

  The NuGet team has recently added the ability to store the package icon URL in the nuspec file. Now I need to have a public copy of the icon available somewhere on the web.  I tried putting it on CodePlex but the URI uses QueryString parameters...

I love Task<T>.  It has to be one of the finest innovations in the framework in the past few years.  Recently I was reviewing some old WCF documentation How to: Implement an Asynchronous Service Operation which was probably written in...

In my previous posts I’ve been arguing that you can implement Task Parallelism with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4).  This post is a part of a series on WF, Parallelism and Threading Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) Activities and Threads The...

In my last post The Workflow Parallel Activity and Task Parallelism I said that you can implement Task Parallelism with Windows Workflow Foundation.  In this post I want to explore some of the differences between the Parallel Activity in System.Workflow...