Mark Schmidt's Abode : Windows Workflow Foundation

Goodbye WF...My New Role

markhsch — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:40:07 GMT

You read right, I am leaving the WF team. I have been a WF Programmer Writer (documentation guy) for awhile now and it's been fun. WF is an awesome technology and I whole heartedly agree with the direction Microsoft is taking it. However, I'm done being a Programmer Writer. A transition date is still being discussed, but I will soon be moving into a developer role working in the Windows Live organization. Words cannot convey how excited I am to get going on the new team. I will miss the WF team but I have to move on. I was a developer at a different company before Microsoft and I came to realize that I missed being in that type of role. I will still write, but it will be relgated back to hobby status instead of a career.

WFPad for Windows Workflow Foundation RTM

markhsch — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 00:17:00 GMT

Since a few people have asked, I updated the source for WFPad to work with the latest and greatest Windows Workflow Foundation.

Click the link to download: WFPad.exe or the zip file: WFPad.zip

Enjoy!

Windows workflow foundation animated activity designer source

markhsch — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 23:23:00 GMT

As I mentioned in my last post, I have uploaded the Animated Activity Designer for use in your own project. A common question I can anticipate being asked is "Why?". So, here's why I created it and my reason as to why you may want to use something like this.

First off, the reason I wanted to try to created animated activities within the Windows Workflow designer was merely to see if it was possible. I knew that I could override OnPaint so I pretty much already knew it was going to be possible (otherwise I probably wouldn't have gone down the path). The second reason is simply because as a guy that loves cool eye candy in UI's, I just had to do it.

So why would you ever want to create an animated activity? Let's say you create an application that hosts the Windows Workflow Designer. Let's also assume that this application is used by your customers. You present them with the designer surface and within a Toolbox like panel, you have your set of custom activities they can use. If pictures are worth a thousand words, then an animation with 10 frames is worth 10,000 words.

The actual code for this is really simple which is also why it only took a couple of hours to get it up and running. Since it is so easy, I won't waste your time explaining it (but feel free to ping me if you have any questions).

Download the code right here: AnimatedActivityDesigner.zip

To see it in action, open the solution in Visual Studio, build it and then open workflow1.cs in the designer.

Enjoy!

To see the video better, right click and select Zoom -> Full Screen

P.S. The activities you see in the project and in the video are simply placeholders. They do not actually do anything.

WFPad for Windows Workflow Foundation Beta 2 is here!

markhsch — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 04:28:00 GMT

Back by popular demand, I now release the Beta 2 version of WFPad. However, it's not a simple port but a new and improved version. In this version, you can open workflows contained in any .NET assemblies (if I recall, that feature didn't work so well in the previous version...though I may be mistaken). I did find Lab 10 from the WF Hands on labs to be quite informative and therefore "borrowed" some code but altered it slightly to work with WFPad. So go ahead and play with it. Will there be bugs? Yes. But since you have the source code, you can fix them for me (sinister laugh). Enjoy!

Click here to download the project