The Activity Designer

reg ADD "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General" /v "SuppressUpperCaseConversion" /t REG_DWORD /d 1 I just thought I'd put this here in case I ever lose the info again. :) Isn't setting up a new machine fun.

Further to my adventures with unobtrusive validation of yesterday, I found myself very stuck while implementing a new form for this new editable metadata feature for the NuGet Gallery. And Yet again the cause of all my pain appears to be this evil combination...

Today while trying to implement some new code, and cutting my teeth on javascript validation, I disbelievingly realized that ALL of our client-side validation had stopped working. Like a month ago. And, nobody had noticed or complained! (As a brief reminder...

'Fluent Interfaces' have been a bit of a buzz for probably long enough that I am not justified in buzzing about them. I was pretty excited when first seeing them applied to databases in form of NHibernate and also kind of excited to see all that code...

Hey, it's been a long time since I updated this blog. Did anybody miss me? Didn't think so. Since the intertubes never stop piping out noise, obviously nobody will have noticed a little silence. In any case it feels nice to give everybody a warm fuzzy...

(Intro: Sometimes as part of testing I go to silly lengths to try to point out what I think is going to be a bug in a piece of code I have seen. And frequently when I do this, I am basically wrong, for any of various reasons – it’s a bug according to...

Today I’m just advertising another MSDN blog that got circulated my way. This post may only going to make full sense if you’ve heard of OData already. If you’re heard of OData, and have been wondering what a good way to use it from workflow might be,...

Today, I set off in a quest to refresh my memory and hopefully also learn something new about sockets, IP, TCP protocols, and so on. Which is quite a breath of nostalgia taking me back to COSC 231 Data Communications. Isn’t it great how when working with...

Today I was involved in a playful discussion about what would we do different about Workflow Designer if we could, and the question of ‘what do customers want?’ came up. I think there’s a lot that can change, but one of the ideas I can’t stay away from...

Dropping the stealth cloak a little, it’s time for some personal news about what I’ve been up to for the last year and a bit. And the answer is? Testing what we are calling in our docs “Workflow 1.0 Beta” (name may change) which...

One of WF’s usability problems in the .Net 4.0 release was the complexity of creating custom ActivityDesigner classes for working with custom activities that expose ActivityAction or ActivityFunc properties . (If you’re wondering what ActivityAction or...

[Minor disclaimer: content in this post is based upon a non-final release candidate build of .Net 4.5] The workflow designer team had two slightly conflicting goals to tackle in .Net 4.5. Goal one: Make Workflow Designer more awesome for everyone in ...

Visual Studio 11 RC is here, and actually it’s now called “Visual Studio 2012 RC”. Obligatory link: Download VS11 (VS 2012) Also for interest, here is (pasted from the .Net 4.5 RC release notes ) the section about WF4 that may be useful if you are looking...

I’ve been publicizing for a while that Visual Studio 11 (still in Beta) supports C# expressions in workflow designer. Of course you might also possibly want to use C# or VB expressions by writing a workflow in code, instead of by building it in...

Although I haven’t used this feature in my regular work, I’ve known for a while that WF4.0 ships with a palette of activities designed to support distributed transactions. A distributed transaction is when you have a transaction, which is an atomic commit...

Hello world - I just wanted to let you know that -Visual Studio 11 and .Net 4.5 are out in public beta . Actually I’m pretty late with this news, so you probably already knew this. Maybe this can just be your reminder to download it and try it out. Because...

[Edit 2/5/12: fixed spelling of 'ignorable' everywhere]. Or “What is this weird XAML I get from workflow designer that doesn’t look like ‘normal’ XAML?” (No ‘news’ today, just some WF4 olds in article format...

Quick Link Post - today Workflow PM Leon Welicki has an article in MSDN Magazine called “What's New in Windows Workflow Foundation 4.5”. Here is the link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh781025.aspx   This article discusses some enhancements...

Today I stumbled upon another WF4 blog with some quality content, so here is my unsolicited and personal recommendation to - if you are thinking about the how-to-host aspects of WF4 - to take a few minutes gaining some insights on how and why WorkflowServiceHost...

If you’re exclusively using the Visual Studio workflow designer to design activities, you might go for a very long time (or forever) without discovering a particular System.Activities namespace, which is System.Activities.Expressions . The first reason...

I have often wanted a nice, easy way to simplify the writing and maintenance of code like this: Log.Trace(string.Format(“FooSetting.BarProperty1 = {0}”), FooSetting.BarProperty1)); Log.Trace(string.Format(“FooSetting.BarProperty2...

Last time I mentioned there is something new in Platform Update 3 Beta called SendReceiveExtension. I still don’t know much about it other than the general reason for adding it to the .Net framework, which is basically to allow non-.Net classes to play...

G’day all, just a little snippet of news to share – remember .Net 4 Platform Update 1 ? The update with State Machine? Well, we are almost up to Platform Update 3 now, and the beta version is available for download . Note that this is not the final PU3...

These questions (paraphrased) have come up a bunch of times so it’s not that hard to find the answer, but I just rediscovered them so it’s on topic for today. “I want to add a namespace to the Imports designer automatically at design time, so the user...

As I mentioned earlier this week there were two WF focused sessions at //build/ this week. Now they’re done, but the videos are available online. Of course, also this week, at //build/ the developer previews of Windows 8, .Net Framework 4.5,...