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,...

Today I was writing a batch file to do make a process semi-automatic. One of the non-automatic stages is copy and pasting some text into a web interface. “It’d be pretty cool” I thought, “if I could just add a line to my batch file saying ‘place %text...

//Build/ is finally on! Session schedules are out, and I just wanted to let people know that there will be a couple WF sessions there in case there are any workflow-interested-attendees. Both the sessions are Friday, one at 12:30 PM (Ron Jacobs [twitter...

There are many examples of binding ETB, but I notice they tend to be short on the details of why the example code looks as it does. Maybe it is because we are short on the ‘why’ that people can get a little lost once they want to do something...

I’m always getting frustrated by little problems at work. One by one they are tiny but gradually they add up. Especially if they happen again and again every day! Running out of hard disk space on my C: drive on one of my machines is one of the ones which...

A little while I begin a new rehosted designer project, and this time I want to get a little bit more creative with it, mixing in some of the stuff I have done earlier with XAML compilation. The more functionality like that I add, the closer to the Visual...

Introit - call it whatever, but today I’m recycling an old post. And I have one more little confession. When I started writing a new rehosted app today, I found out my old toolbox FAQ was fairly useless. It was even getting to the point where someone...

Sometimes it happens that via the forums I learn about a new [to me] beast in the WF Zoo. Today that animal is WorkflowDataContext . The MSDN document is terse: “Represents the data context of the current workflow environment and provides...

One of our internal customers pinged me with a quick question today. He asked whether it is possible to set a default type argument for T if you have an activity of GenericType, say DataCollectorActivity<T>. I might have said this in passing by...

Hello State Machine fans! There have now been several eras of support for state machines in WF4 and WF3, and I think it would be good for a retrospective, part stocktake, part promo and making sure everyone is up-to-date (+reminder of CTP license terms...

[Or: Rant - Code-Reviewing Random Code on the Internet.] I’m sure I’ve stumbled upon this post before once, and I hit it again today. I think it’s a little unfortunate this appears so high up in the results, as the post has a bunch...

For one of my little projects at work, I’ve been creating a utility which will run as a child process which is just hosted as a console application. It prints a lot of output to console, and it would be kinda useful to be able to capture all the output...

Recently I noticed that I had automatically installed .Net Framework Platform Update 1 along with something else. So I should be able to use State Machine in my workflows now, right? Half right, half wrong! I forgot (and I am sure I am not the only one...

Today I had the pleasure of attending a brownbag (read ‘lunchtime presentation’) by Dustin Metzgar from the WF Performance team. He ran us through a slide deck with a lot of interesting performance comparisons between WF3 and WF4. Workflow Foundation...

AsyncCodeActivity is a nice class for wrapping calls to asynchronous APIs and turning them into activities that can run super-efficiently. But! There are a few limitations to being a subclass of AsyncCodeActivity when compared to NativeActivity. Such...

Over time a few folks have asked on the forum for information about writing rehosted visual workflow debugger applications (a.k.a. workflow simulator, a.k.a. visual workflow tracking…). Many of these folks have already seen the Visual Workflow Tracking...

or: best practices registering Workflow Activity Designers Getting your first custom Activity Designer to show up is not hard. There are plenty of samples to find. However, something mostly under-explained in such samples is that the way you get started...

Hey everybody, just in case you haven’t heard the good news yet, our group released .Net Framework 4 Platform Update 1 today.  Hurray!   By the way, like me you may be confused upon hearing the term ‘platform update’ used this way. What does...