The .NET Endpoint : Hands On Labs

WF 3.5 Hands On Labs Updated

Cliff Simpkins — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:39:18 GMT

The ten Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) hands-on labs were updated today on Microsoft download center for your coding enjoyment!

These ten labs were initially posted when WF was new to the world and .NET 3.0 was hot off the presses. This past winter, the product management team worked with David Starr to get the labs converted to .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, make the manuals consistent, and bring the VB.NET code up par to follow the same best practices as the C# code.

Once installed, you will have the following labs installed on your machine:

WF01: Getting Started with WF
WF02: Creating Custom Activities with WF
WF03: Hosting Workflows in WF
WF04: Creating State Machine Workflows in WF
WF05: Communicating with the Host Application for WF
WF06: WF and Web Services
WF07: Creating Rules Driven Workflow in WF
WF08: Transactional Behavior in WF
WF09: Modifying Workflow Models at Runtime with Workflow Change in WF
WF10: Embedding the Workflow Designer for WF

About half the labs saw some significant updating and clean-up – and they should yield a greatly improved experience for the learner; we applied feedback from HOL participants who took the labs at our events and provided an evaluation. The second half of the labs were more simply migrated and cleaned up for consistency.

But wait! There’s more! :)

While we were at it, we added an eleventh lab to the mix. Because the labs were developed before the new WCF activities were introduced, we dug into the excellent Visual Studio 2008 training kit done by the DPE folks, we updated and cleaned up the lab that walked a user through using the new WCF Send and Receive activities for WF in .NET 3.5:

WF11: Workflow Enabled Services and Other New Features in the .NET Framework 3.5

The product management team will be making three additional hands-on labs available in the near future: unit testing WF workflows (currently available on MSDN Virtual Labs), unit testing WCF services, and advanced context management in WF 3.5 (built by Matt Milner, and unveiled at TechEd 2009 North America). All three labs have scored pretty well at events, and we’re looking forward to sharing them with you for direct download.

We hope that you find these updated labs useful; and, as always, welcome your feedback and comments.

Enjoy!
- Cliff

Rundown on WCF, WF, and ‘Dublin’ sessions @ TechEd next week

Cliff Simpkins — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:27:05 GMT

As I spend much of this week finalizing items for TechEd next week, I thought it might be helpful to post a schedule of the great content that will be presented at the event.

If you haven’t already pre-registered for sessions, now is an excellent time to look through the schedule builder and check out all the great content and speakers we have lined up at the event.

As is tradition, the bulk of the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) sessions are in the SOA and Business Process track. This year, we are joined in the SOA track by sessions covering the ‘Dublin’ technology extensions for Windows Server, which allow you to easily host and manage your .NET 4 WCF and WF applications.

Breakout Sessions

This year, we’ve assembled some of the greatest speakers on the topics, so please join us for the following breakout sessions:

Session	Title	Speaker	Timeslot	Room
SOA201	A First Look at WCF and WF in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4	Aaron Skonnard	Tues, May-12; 8:30am	Petree Hall D
SOA202	A Lap around Microsoft Code Name "Dublin"	Dan Eshner	Tues, May-12; 2:45pm	Room 404
SOA206	Every Class As a Service: WCF As the New Microsoft .NET	Juval Lowy	Thus, May-14; 2:45pm	Room 151
SOA302	Building RESTful Services Using WCF	Jon Flanders	Thurs, May-14; 10:15am	Room 404
SOA303	Busy Microsoft .NET Developer's Guide to WCF, SOA, and Success	Jon Flanders	Fri, May-15; 1:00pm	Room 151
SOA309	Load Balancing and Scaling Your WCF Services Today and Tomorrow	Michèle Leroux Bustamante	Weds, May-13; 4:30pm	Room 515B
SOA310	Managing, Tracking, and Troubleshooting Services in "Dublin"	Ford McKinstry	Tues, May-12; 4:30pm	Room 403A
SOA401	Developing Service Oriented Workflows	Brian Noyes	Weds, May-13; 8:30am	Room 502B

For those unable to attend TechEd in person, my understanding is that all of the breakout sessions above will be recorded and be made available online. As we get more information post-event, we will post additional information up here on the blog.

In addition to the breakout sessions above, there is content that will be presented at TechEd that will unfortunately not be made available online after the event, this comes in three forms: the pre-conference sessions and interactive theatre sessions.

Pre-Conference Session

As I mentioned in my blog post on Friday, Zoiner Tejada and Michele Leroux Bustamante will be presenting a pre-conference on Sunday, the day before TechEd (PRC07: A Day of WCF + WF + "Dublin") that covers WCF and WF for .NET 4. The day is full of presentations and demos, and Michele and Zoiner have worked hard to update the session to cover the beta 1 features we’re talking about here. There are still seats available for the pre-conference, and it looks to be a real treat for those who can make it.

Interactive Theatre Sessions

Additionally, there are interactive theatre sessions that happen on the event floor among the booths. Within the Application Platform section of the floor (you can find us by looking for lots of blue), we have two theatres. Within the interactive theatres, we will have the following three sessions over the course of the week in Blue Theatre 2 that many folks are sure to find interesting:

Session	Title	Speaker	Timeslot
SOA02-INT	Communicating with State Machine Workflows	Philip Wolfe	Tues, May-12 1:00pm
SOA03-INT	Interacting with Web Services Using Microsoft Silverlight	Yavor Georgiev	Tues, May-12 4:30pm
SOA05-INT	Migrating a WF 3.0 Application to the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 and Microsoft Code Name "Dublin"	Tom Castiglia Zoiner Tejada	Weds, May-13 10:15am

Hands On Labs

We also have six hands on labs at TechEd this year, the two introducing labs have been updated based on past event feedback, and we’ve added four of brand new labs! If you have an 45-60 minutes and like to get your hands dirty with some code while you learn, please check them out:

HOL Code	HOL Title
SOA09-HOL	WCF REST: Addressability of Resources
SOA10-HOL	WCF REST: Exposing a Resource Collection with the WCF REST Starter Kit
SOA12-HOL	WCF 3.5: Introducing Windows Communication Foundation 3.5
SOA13-HOL	WCF 3.5: Unit Testing Windows Communication Foundation 3.5
SOA14-HOL	WCF and WF 3.5: Using Advanced Context Management in WCF Workflow Services 3.5
SOA15-HOL	WF 3.5: Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation 3.5

Booth

Then of course there is always the booth. The booth is open every day of the conference, and we’ll have folks there through lunch and during sessions – ready to chat with you about the technologies and show you how things work. If you have questions about WCF, WF, or ‘Dublin’, or would like to learn more about how the technologies may apply to your solution – feel free to drop by.

Over the course of the week, we have folks at the booth that can talk at a high level (BTW-that’s me ;-) ), all the way to folks that can talk through how and why the API works the way it does. And if you can’t get your question answered at that time, we should be able to help you connect with someone at the booth who can help, or getting you the answer post-conference. We have a really good crew at the booth again this year (and I’m told we have a small white board at the booth this year!)

All of that being said, we hope to see you in LA next week and to learn more about how you’re using WCF and WF today – it should be a lot of fun all around. And for those unable to attend, check out the online recordings and continue to engage with us in the forums and the Connect site!

New Virtual Lab - Using Test First Development with WF 3.5

Cliff Simpkins — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 06:59:47 GMT

I'm very pleased to announce the publication of a new WF 3.5 hands-on lab to the MSDN Virtual Labs site: Using Test-First Development with WF.

The new lab covers doing test-first development in the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) technology. The lab explains [at a high level] the concepts of test-first development, and walks the user through how to unit test both custom activities and full WF workflows.

Unit testing and test-first development seems to become a very popular topic in the last year. The question of how to unit test WF activities/workflows has been something that I've heard asked about at the last few conferences I've attended (both internal and customer conferences; at the WF booth and advanced WF sessions), and it's been a question our field has been getting as well.

In answer to the question - there have been a couple excellent blog posts on the topic this past summer: Maurice de Beijer wrote an excellent (and concise) blog entry on the topic in June - which was the inspiration for the lab, and Ron Jacobs blogged on the topic following a conversation we were having about whether to do this HOL. And, most recently, WF unit testing was covered in the last two issues of MSDN Magazine (Matt Milner's Nov-2008 Foundations article and Josh Lane's Dec-2008 article 'Real World WF: Best Practices').

But the feedback has been what was lacking was a good, approachable manner of learning how to do WF unit testing. So we worked with David Starr, a trainer and consultant specializing in agile processes, to build a lab that attempted to demonstrate how a developer can use Visual Studio Team System and/or Professional to establish unit tests for WF activity and workflow development. The lab was written assuming basic experience with WF 3, but no prior experience with test-first development principles. To work with some of the less unit-test-ready aspects of WF 3.5, David walks the user through the use of fake objects and the Rhino Mocks mocking framework (there are a variety of mocking frameworks out there; Rhino Mocks is one of them).

As mentioned in the beginning of the blog post, in addition to hosting the lab in our hands-on-lab areas at TechEd this year, we have published the lab to MSDN Virtual Labs to enable a broader audience to experience the lab. For those unfamiliar, the Virtual Labs environment offers you a way to test drive Microsoft software without having to download or install the software on your local machine. To do the hands on lab, you visit the Virtual Lab website and it will provision you a pristine virtual server for you do the lab, which is [virtually] yours for a two-hour block. The connection to the server is done through the web browser, requiring only the installation of an ActiveX component. You can then follow the instructions in the lab manual to try out the lab and learn more about unit testing activities and workflows WF 3.5.

In addition to this WF lab, there are a couple other notable virtual labs I would like to point out:

We're working on delivering a few new WF hands on labs via this method over the coming months. We are working on a new hands-on-lab detailing conversation correlation in WCF workflow services (based on Matt Winkler's TechEd talks) and also updating the VS2005 hands-on-labs to VS2008, incorporating user feedback.

We are also in the process of posting the test-first development with WCF hands-on-lab. If you poke around in the C:\Labs directory of this virtual lab, you'll notice it's there (with lab manuals and relevant begin/end code).

I hope you enjoy the new lab; and, as always, your feedback is appreciated!

Cliff