The Activity Designer

Not actually a WF 4.0 blog any more :)

Grokking ContextAwareResult (.Net internals)

(This is the sequel to grokking LazyAsyncResult, which could be considered a prerequisite.) You'll...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 10/17/2016

Grokking LazyAsyncResult (.Net internal)

(Background: sometimes as I try to understand our bugs, I have to learn about the .net internal...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 10/17/2016

Slimming down your build - don't copy the intellisense files!

So you know how a lot of nuget packages include intellisense XML files and they get copied to your...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 05/01/2015

Is Autofac magical - part II

Now that you've read part I perhaps you can answer this. What does this code do? class FO :...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 04/06/2015

Is Autofac magical?

The answer is yes! OK let me explain. I never registered anything as...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 04/03/2015

Distilling some ideas for keeping that data access code (and test code) tidy...

I just spent a while doing some refactoring. It turned out to be a very long while, probably much...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 04/02/2015

Request and connection throttling when self hosting with OwinHttpListener

[Disclaimer before we begin: I'm not really an expert on OWIN (henceforth 'owin') or HttpListener -...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 03/11/2015

Exploring F# (1)

C# and typescript are starting to feel too familiar and dull, so I went exploring. I fired up my...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 02/17/2015

Everything but the language design…?

So I’ve been reading some history of programming languages. And one question that came up a lot is...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 12/05/2014

Reading performance counter data in .NET

Nothing you can’t easily write yourself, but while playing around, I wrote this one myself, and...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 11/21/2014

Tests should explain something

I sometimes see unit tests which are downright confusingly opaque. Being a unit test, they are...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 09/19/2014

Is IQueryable poisoning your interfaces?

Thanks indirectly to a comment on my previous post, today I read ‘IQueryable is tight coupling’...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 09/15/2014

Some code patterns I don't love in C#.

Pattern 1: TryGetFoo that returns boolean. MyEnum ret;if (Enum.TryParse<MyEnum>(normalized,...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 08/29/2014

Azure Web Roles + RoleShared. Grrrrr…

I had a deployment to azure failing yesterday, and I thought ‘I know what caused this. It’s a dll...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 08/28/2014

Azure SDK has trouble with worker roles whose names are different from the role’s project name – and how to fix it

I had seen this before, but today I became determined to figure out how to fix my targets file. The...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 08/18/2014

The lexer hack

I found recently I like to do the coding more slowly and intersperse more reading than was once the...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 08/11/2014

Scripting vs module systems...

A well known pain point of the CLR is that loading your program and running a few lines takes too...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 08/11/2014

More tokenizing...

So I flippantly said 'write a helper function that captures the right pattern for tokenizing' last...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 08/11/2014

In which I try to write a tokenizer, and fail...

I reread something by Steve Yegge, which I think was his NBL thing. Anyway, he said something to the...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 08/02/2014

A Quick Reference to Azure Diagnostics

If you’ve used Azure much, you may have eventually decided to use the DiagnosticsAgent plugin, as I...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 05/28/2014

The code pattern of doing everything in IQueryProvider…

(Rambling) I’m taking another short foray into IQueryable land. From my learnings last time, In...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 03/05/2014

Is it a bug?: ClientWebSocket

The following program always fails for me with the web socket reaching the aborted state within a...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 02/19/2014

How fast can your HTTP server go?

I have a burning question on my mind. How fast can an HTTP/HTTPS server go? When I say fast, I have...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 02/17/2014

Unit Testing DbContexts and queries – the status quo

So here’s the scene. I’ve been working on unit testing for a solid day, my percent...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 02/14/2014

Reflections on unit tests (and more what happened next) and introducing ashmind and his Argument NuGet package

Here are a few thoughts about the refactoring process from going through my initial unit testing...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 02/13/2014

Struggling with unit tests (what happened next)

This is going to be a fairly uninteresting and hard to follow post, but its here for the record,...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 02/12/2014

Struggling with unit tests (again)

I am having a mental hard time today because of unit tests. Not tests that fail... tests that don't...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 02/12/2014

CA2202: Do not dispose objects multiple times How I hate this rule! Firstly, the rule is predicated...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 02/12/2014

How to view Azure Diagnostics Traces from WADLogsTable in your local console app

If you use Azure Diagnostics in your cloud service, and you use the DiagnosticTraceListener then all...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 02/11/2014

A light-weight .Net ThreadPool Timer class

By letting the operating system to the heavy lifting! But first, what inspired this article? I was...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 01/29/2014

Who knew… that pthreads Condition came to Windows?

Not me! Until I happened across the SleepConditionalVariableCS function doc. It seems like it’s been...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 11/22/2013

If only you could set properties on fakes.

I'm using this library called FakeItEasy. The more I use it the more I like it. While using it I...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 06/14/2013

Note to self - how to stop VS 2012 menus being all caps

reg ADD "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General" /v "SuppressUpperCaseConversion" /t...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 05/21/2013

The mystery of the missing URL validation

Further to my adventures with unobtrusive validation of yesterday, I found myself very stuck while...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 05/08/2013

Regular expressions are different in javascript! And Unintrusive Validation.

Today while trying to implement some new code, and cutting my teeth on javascript validation, I...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 05/07/2013

The Entity Framework Leaking

'Fluent Interfaces' have been a bit of a buzz for probably long enough that I am not justified in...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 04/02/2013

The joy of Change

Hey, it's been a long time since I updated this blog. Did anybody miss me? Didn't think so. Since...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 02/05/2013

(WF4,VS) WorkflowDesigner Extensions in Visual Studio 2012

(Intro: Sometimes as part of testing I go to silly lengths to try to point out what I think is going...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 10/04/2012

Today I’m just advertising another MSDN blog that got circulated my way. This post may only going to...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 09/13/2012

(WF4) Survey–have you customized FlowDecision?

Today I was involved in a playful discussion about what would we do different about Workflow...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 09/05/2012

(News) Workflow 1.0 Beta

Dropping the stealth cloak a little, it’s time for some personal news about what I’ve...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 07/17/2012

(WF 4.5) Simplified activity designers with Activity Delegates (ActivityAction/ActivityFunc) in .Net 4.5

One of WF’s usability problems in the .Net 4.0 release was the complexity of creating custom...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 06/05/2012

(WF4.5) Enabling new .Net framework 4.5 features in your rehosted designer application

[Minor disclaimer: content in this post is based upon a non-final release candidate build of .Net...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 06/04/2012

Visual Studio 11 RC (and .Net 4.5 RC) out now!

Visual Studio 11 RC is here, and actually it’s now called “Visual Studio 2012 RC”. Obligatory link:...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 05/31/2012

(WF4.5) Using CSharpValue and CSharpReference in .Net 4.5 – Compiling expressions–and changes in Visual Studio generated XAML

I’ve been publicizing for a while that Visual Studio 11 (still in Beta) supports C#...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 05/24/2012

(WF4, Transactions) Implementation of Transactions in WF4, and Implications

Although I haven’t used this feature in my regular work, I’ve known for a while that WF4.0 ships...

Author: tilovell09 Date: 03/13/2012

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