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 before but the answer is yes, the same technique is...

Disclaimer: no WF 4.0 runtime experts were consulted for advice in the thinking of this. YMMV. Things have been busy lately and though I have had a couple requests to continue the ICompositeView series (see earlier posts), I haven’t had much free time. Compounding the free time scarcity, decisions seem...

Forum posts give me a lot of crazy ideas. This one might be a throwaway, but it’s the process of trying things out and exploring that triggers off yet more ideas. :-) Occasionally Workflow Foundation 4 developers feel bugged by the need for Variables. Or actually the ‘ceremony’ of using Variables...

…NativeActivity . Provides all of the features of CodeActivity, plus aborting activity execution, canceling child activity execution, using bookmarks , and scheduling activities… As of .Net Fx 4.0 Beta 2, the Activity class hierarchy looks a bit like this: Actually this is only a tiny chunk of...

This is Part 6 of a series of posts on flowchart-like freeform layout activity designers, [ Part 1 – Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 - Part 7 ] I’ve started varying the titles. In Parts 1-4 we began developing a freeform layout designer called CanvasDesigner . In Part 5, we found that it...

A few people have noticed in the Workflow Foundation Beta 2 forums that the looping constructs provided in System.Activities.Statements such as While activity, ForEach activity, and ParallelForEach lack certain features found in their C# counterparts - there is no break or continue statement. This seemed...

This post is Part 2 of a series on writing custom activity designers. [ Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 ] Last time we found out that ICompositeView .OnItemsDelete() will never get called - unless we tell our contained activities exactly which composite view they belong to. But we didn...

[This post is Part 1 of a series on writing custom activity designers. Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7 ] Motivation: Building an activity like Flowchart Creating composite activities and designers in Workflow Foundation 4.0 is really easy when you use WorkflowItemPresenter and WorkflowItemsPresenter...