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  • How do I Series: Connecting an Expression Blend Project to Team Foundation Server

    - by Enrique Lima
    I have heard of people wanting and needing to add projects created in Expression Blend to Team Foundation Server. Here is the recipe: 1) Create your project in Expression Blend … click OK 2) Select the option to open your recently created project in Visual Studio. Once that option is selected, your solution will open up in Visual Studio, close Expression Blend at this point. Now, I want to add this project to Source Control … Next, I connect to my TFS environment, and pick the location to save my project Once the project is added, I will get a status window of pending changes for my project, all that we are left to do is to check in those changes. Since we have checked in our project, we can now close Visual Studio, and we will proceed to open Expression Blend again. And select our project we will! We notice some differences from before, just by opening it What differences you say?!? Notice the lock to the right of the item name … And we also get this when we right click … And there we have it, it is a combination of tools to achieve this, but it is well worth it.

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  • Passiionate about Microsoft Technology - Help raise money for Cystic Fibrosis Foundation

    - by Testas
    I need your help! Please sign up to help our team raise $10,000 for Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Simply by becoming a team member (a bit like a fan) and you will be helping our team earn points and advance in the race to rasie the money for charity.   If you can tick any of the boxes below then we need your help: Already Microsoft Certified? Hold a MCP/MCSA/MCSE/MCT/TS/MCITP? Want to help sufferers from the most common genetically inherited disease? Passionate about Microsoft Technology? Like to Blog, Tweet, email, connect! Enjoy the thrill of the race! Follow the Born To Learn Blog? Join our blue team and help us become the leader of the race.so please sign in with your Live ID which is associated with your MCP account and register with us - also take a look at the blue forums - we are building up some cool info! http://bit.ly/blueteam  or  http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/prix/p/index.aspx Please blog and let people know about this! Regards Chris

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  • Why has Foundation 4 made its grid classes less natural and readable?

    - by Brenden
    The Background I love responsive CSS grids. I hate Bootstrap's complex class names. I fell in love with Foundations human readable class names. The Problem With Foundation 4, they have changed four columns to large-4 small-4 columns and in my opinion this makes the HTML markup less clear. This style of CSS class names is exactly why I switched from Bootstrap to Foundation. The Question What advantage is gained by Foundation 4's Grid in making this change? It seems that you can have a different grid layout on smaller screens via media queries, but I can't think of a design that would require this. Note: I've been focused on native mobile development and therefore I may be missing out on recent best practices.

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  • Book Review: Inside Windows Communicat?ion Foundation by Justin Smith

    - by Sam Abraham
    In gearing up for a new major project, I have taken it upon myself to research and review various aspects of our Microsoft stack of choice seeking new creative ways for us to leverage in our upcoming state-of-the-art solution projected to position us ahead of the competition. While I am a big supporter of search engines and online articles as a quick and usually reliable source of information, I have opted in my investigative quest to actually “hit the books”.  I have also made it a habit to provide quick reviews for material I go over hoping this can be of help to someone who may be looking for items others may have had success using for reference. I have started a few months ago by investigating better ways to implementing, profiling and troubleshooting SQL Server 2008. My reference of choice was Itzik Ben-Gan et al’s “Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008” series. While it has been a month since my last book review, this by no means meant that I have been sitting idle. It has been pretty challenging to balance research with the continuous flow of projects and deadlines all while balancing that with my family duties which, of course, always comes first. In this post, I will be providing a quick review of my latest reading: Inside Windows Communication Foundation by Justin Smith. This book has been on my reading list for a very long time and I am proud to have finally tackled it. Justin’s book presents a great coverage of WCF internals. His simple, concise and well-worded style has simplified the relatively complex internals of WCF and made it comprehensible. Justin opted to organize the book into three parts: an introduction to WCF, coverage of the Channel Layer and a look at WCF internals at the ServiceModel layer. Part I introduced the concepts and made the case behind WCF while covering a simplified version of WCF’s message patterns, endpoints and contracts. In Part II, Justin provided a thorough coverage of the internals of Messages, Channels and Channel Managers. Part III concluded this nice reading with coverage of Bindings, Contracts, Dispatchers and Clients. While one would not likely need to extend WCF at that low level of the API, an understanding of the inner-workings of WCF is a must to avoid pitfalls mainly caused by misinformation or erroneous assumptions. Problems can quickly arise in high-traffic hosted solutions, but most can be easily avoided with some minimal time investment and education. My next goal is to pay a closer look at WCF from the programmer’s API perspective now that I have acquired a better understanding of its inner working.   Many thanks to the O’Reilly User Group Program and its support of our West Palm Beach Developers’ Group.   Stay tuned for more… All the best, --Sam

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  • Windows Presentation Foundation 4.5 Cookbook Review

    - by Ricardo Peres
    As promised, here’s my review of Windows Presentation Foundation 4.5 Cookbook, that Packt Publishing kindly made available to me. It is an introductory book, targeted at WPF newcomers or users with few experience, following the typical recipes or cookbook style. Like all Packt Publishing books on development, each recipe comes with sample code that is self-sufficient for understanding the concepts it tries to illustrate. It starts on chapter 1 by introducing the most important concepts, the XAML language itself, what can be declared in XAML and how to do it, what are dependency and attached properties as well as markup extensions and events, which should give readers a most required introduction to how WPF works and how to do basic stuff. It moves on to resources on chapter 2, which also makes since, since it’s such an important concept in WPF. Next, chapter 3, come the panels used for laying controls on the screen, all of the out of the box panels are described with typical use cases. Controls come next in chapter 4; the difference between elements and controls is introduced, as well as content controls, headered controls and items controls, and all standard controls are introduced. The book shows how to change the way they look by using templates. The next chapter, 5, talks about top level windows and the WPF application object: how to access startup arguments, how to set the main window, using standard dialogs and there’s even a sample on how to have a irregularly-shaped window. This is one of the most important concepts in WPF: data binding, which is the theme for the following chapter, 6. All common scenarios are introduced, the binding modes, directions, triggers, etc. It talks about the INotifyPropertyChanged interface and how to use it for notifying data binding subscribers of changes in data sources. Data templates and selectors are also covered, as are value converters and data triggers. Examples include master-detail and sorting, grouping and filtering collections and binding trees and grids. Last it covers validation rules and error templates. Chapter 7 talks about the current trend in WPF development, the Model View View-Model (MVVM) framework. This is a well known pattern for connecting things interface to actions, and it is explained competently. A typical implementation is presented which also presents the command pattern used throughout WPF. A complete application using MVVM is presented from start to finish, including typical features such as undo. Style and layout is covered on chapter 8. Why/how to use styles, applying them automatically,  using the many types of triggers to change styles automatically, using Expression Blend behaviors and templates are all covered. Next chapter, 9, is about graphics and animations programming. It explains how to create shapes, transform common UI elements, apply special effects and perform simple animations. The following chapter, 10, is about creating custom controls, either by deriving from UserControl or from an existing control or framework element class, applying custom templates for changing the way the control looks. One useful example is a custom layout panel that arranges its children along a circumference. The final chapter, 11, is about multi-threading programming and how one can integrate it with WPF. Includes how to invoke methods and properties on WPF classes from threads other than the main UI, using background tasks and timers and even using the new C# 5.0 asynchronous operations. It’s an interesting book, like I said, mostly for newcomers. It provides a competent introduction to WPF, with examples that cover the most common scenarios and also give directions to more complex ones. I recommend it to everyone wishing to learn WPF.

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  • Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and things I were more intuitive

    - by pjohnson
    I've started using Windows Workflow Foundation, and so far ran into a few things that aren't incredibly obvious. Microsoft did a good job of providing a ton of samples, which is handy because you need them to get anywhere with WF. The docs are thin, so I've been bouncing between samples and downloadable labs to figure out how to implement various activities in a workflow. Code separation or not? You can create a workflow and activity in Visual Studio with or without code separation, i.e. just a .cs "Component" style object with a Designer.cs file, or a .xoml XML markup file with code behind (beside?) it. Absence any obvious advantage to one or the other, I used code separation for workflows and any complex custom activities, and without code separation for custom activities that just inherit from the Activity class and thus don't have anything special in the designer. So far, so good. Service - In the WF world, this is simply a class that talks to the workflow about things outside the workflow, not to be confused with how the term "service" is used in every other context I've seen in the Windows and .NET world, i.e. an executable that waits for events or requests from a client and services them (Windows service, web service, WCF service, etc.). ListenActivity - Such a great concept, yet so unintuitive. It seems you need at least two branches (EventDrivenActivity instances), one for your positive condition and one for a timeout. The positive condition has a HandleExternalEventActivity, and the timeout has a DelayActivity followed by however you want to handle the delay, e.g. a ThrowActivity. The timeout is simple enough; wiring up the HandleExternalEventActivity is where things get fun. You need to create a service (see above), and an interface for that service (this seems more complex than should be necessary--why not have activities just wire to a service directly?). And you need to create a custom EventArgs class that inherits from ExternalDataEventArgs--you can't create an ExternalDataEventArgs event handler directly, even if you don't need to add any more information to the event args, despite ExternalDataEventArgs not being marked as an abstract class, nor a compiler error nor warning nor any other indication that you're doing something wrong, until you run it and find that it always times out and get to check every place mentioned here to see why. Your interface and service need an event that consumes your custom EventArgs class, and a method to fire that event. You need to call that method from somewhere. Then you get to hope that you did everything just right, or that you can step through code in the debugger before your Delay timeout expires. Yes, it's as much fun as it sounds. TransactionScopeActivity - I had the bright idea of putting one in as a placeholder, then filling in the database updates later. That caused this error: The workflow hosting environment does not have a persistence service as required by an operation on the workflow instance "[GUID]". ...which is about as helpful as "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" and even more fun to debug. Google led me to this Microsoft Forums hit, and from there I figured out it didn't like that the activity had no children. Again, a Validator on TransactionScopeActivity would have pointed this out to me at design time, rather than handing me a nearly useless error at runtime. Easily enough, I disabled the activity and that fixed it. I still see huge potential in my work where WF could make things easier and more flexible, but there are some seriously rough edges at the moment. Maybe I'm just spoiled by how much easier and more intuitive development elsewhere in the .NET Framework is.

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  • Share code between projects in tfs 2010

    - by Jimmy Engtröm
    Hi What is the best way to handle code sharing in TFS 2010? We have a couple of Visual studio projects that other Visual Studio projects use. ex: Shared Project Project 1 Solution -Shared Project -Project 1 Project Project 2 Solution -Shared Project -Project 2 Project Also we have Third party code for example: Third Party -Telerik --2009.1.402.35 --2009.02.0701.35 When I open my "Project 1" solution i want my shared code project to be included in that solution. (thats the way we work today). We basically have one TFS Project that contains all the code. Now we want to use it the "right" (?) way, We would like to have Project 1 and 2 in separate TFS solutions. If I for example makes sure we have all our project in the same structure on disk and just add the shared project to my Project 1 solution (even if the projects reside in two different TFS Projects) would that work with builds? How have you solved the problem, I guess we are not the only ones having shared code between projects? Cheers /Jimmy

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  • Scheduling runtime-specified Activity in Workflow 4 RC

    - by johnny g
    Hi, so I have this requirement to kick off Activities provided to me at run-time. To facilitate this, I have set up a WorkflowService that receives Activities as Xaml, hydrates them, and kicks them off. Sounds simple enough ... ... this is my WorkflowService in Xaml <Activity x:Class="Workflow.Services.WorkflowService.WorkflowService" ... xmlns:local1="clr-namespace:Workflow.Activities" > <Sequence sap:VirtualizedContainerService.HintSize="277,272"> <Sequence.Variables> <Variable x:TypeArguments="local:Workflow" Name="Workflow" /> </Sequence.Variables> <sap:WorkflowViewStateService.ViewState> <scg3:Dictionary x:TypeArguments="x:String, x:Object"> <x:Boolean x:Key="IsExpanded">True</x:Boolean> </scg3:Dictionary> </sap:WorkflowViewStateService.ViewState> <p:Receive CanCreateInstance="True" DisplayName="ReceiveSubmitWorkflow" sap:VirtualizedContainerService.HintSize="255,86" OperationName="SubmitWorkflow" ServiceContractName="IWorkflowService"> <p:ReceiveParametersContent> <OutArgument x:TypeArguments="local:Workflow" x:Key="workflow">[Workflow]</OutArgument> </p:ReceiveParametersContent> </p:Receive> <local1:InvokeActivity Activity="[ActivityXamlServices.Load(New System.IO.StringReader(Workflow.Xaml))]" sap:VirtualizedContainerService.HintSize="255,22" /> </Sequence> </Activity> ... which, except for repetitive use of "Workflow" is pretty straight forward. In fact, it's just a Sequence with a Receive and [currently] a custom Activity called InvokeActivity. Get to that in a bit. Receive Activity accepts a custom type, [DataContract] public class Workflow { [DataMember] public string Xaml { get; set; } } which contains a string whose contents are to be interpreted as Xaml. You can see the VB expression that then converts this Xaml to an Activity and passes it on. Now this second bit, the custom InvokeActivity is where I have questions. First question: 1) given an arbitrary task, provided at runtime [as described above] is it possible to kick off this Activity using Activities that ship with WF4RC, out of the box? I'm fairly new, and thought I did a good job going through the API and existing documentation, but may as well ask :) Second: 2) my first attempt at implementing a custom InvokeActivity looked like this public sealed class InvokeActivity : NativeActivity { private static readonly ILog _log = LogManager.GetLogger (typeof (InvokeActivity)); public InArgument<Activity> Activity { get; set; } public InvokeActivity () { _log.DebugFormat ("Instantiated."); } protected override void Execute (NativeActivityContext context) { Activity activity = Activity.Get (context); _log.DebugFormat ("Scheduling activity [{0}]...", activity.DisplayName); // throws exception to lack of metadata! :( ActivityInstance instance = context.ScheduleActivity (activity, OnComplete, OnFault); _log.DebugFormat ( "Scheduled activity [{0}] with instance id [{1}].", activity.DisplayName, instance.Id); } protected override void CacheMetadata (NativeActivityMetadata metadata) { // how does one add InArgument<T> to metadata? not easily // is my first guess base.CacheMetadata (metadata); } // private methods private void OnComplete ( NativeActivityContext context, ActivityInstance instance) { _log.DebugFormat ( "Scheduled activity [{0}] with instance id [{1}] has [{2}].", instance.Activity.DisplayName, instance.Id, instance.State); } private void OnFault ( NativeActivityFaultContext context, Exception exception, ActivityInstance instance) { _log.ErrorFormat ( @"Scheduled activity [{0}] with instance id [{1}] has faulted in state [{2}] {3}", instance.Activity.DisplayName, instance.Id, instance.State, exception.ToStringFullStackTrace ()); } } Which attempts to schedule the specified Activity within the current context. Unfortunately, however, this fails. When I attempt to schedule said Activity, the runtime returns with the following exception The provided activity was not part of this workflow definition when its metadata was being processed. The problematic activity named 'DynamicActivity' was provided by the activity named 'InvokeActivity'. Right, so the "dynamic" Activity provided at runtime is not a member of InvokeActivitys metadata. Googled and came across this. Couldn't sort out how to specify an InArgument<Activity> to metadata cache, so my second question is, naturally, how does one address this issue? Is it ill advised to use context.ScheduleActivity (...) in this manner? Third and final, 3) I have settled on this [simpler] solution for the time being, public sealed class InvokeActivity : NativeActivity { private static readonly ILog _log = LogManager.GetLogger (typeof (InvokeActivity)); public InArgument<Activity> Activity { get; set; } public InvokeActivity () { _log.DebugFormat ("Instantiated."); } protected override void Execute (NativeActivityContext context) { Activity activity = Activity.Get (context); _log.DebugFormat ("Invoking activity [{0}] ...", activity.DisplayName); // synchronous execution ... a little less than ideal, this // seems heavy handed, and not entirely semantic-equivalent // to what i want. i really want to invoke this runtime // activity as if it were one of my own, not a separate // process - wrong mentality? WorkflowInvoker.Invoke (activity); _log.DebugFormat ("Invoked activity [{0}].", activity.DisplayName); } } Which simply invokes specified task synchronously within its own runtime instance thingy [use of WF4 vernacular is certainly questionable]. Eventually, I would like to tap into WF's tracking and possibly persistance facilities. So my third and final question is, in terms of what I would like to do [ie kick off arbitrary workflows inbound from client applications] is this the preferred method? Alright, thanks in advance for your time and consideration :)

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  • How to hook up WF4 WorkflowRuntime events when using a XAMLX service

    - by Joel D'Souza
    I'm currently using a BehaviorExtensionElement to load a ServiceBehavior where the ApplyDispatchBehavior method is set up as: public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(ServiceDescription serviceDescription, System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase serviceHostBase) { WorkflowServiceHost host = serviceHostBase as WorkflowServiceHost; if (host != null) { UnityService.CreateContainer(); host.WorkflowExtensions.Add<IUnityContainer>(delegate { return UnityService.CreateChildContainer(); }); System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("NotificationService : Adding extension"); WorkflowRuntimeBehavior wfbehavior = serviceDescription.Behaviors.Find<WorkflowRuntimeBehavior>(); WorkflowRuntime runtime = wfbehavior.WorkflowRuntime; runtime.WorkflowStarted += runtime_WorkflowStarted; runtime.WorkflowCreated += runtime_WorkflowCreated; runtime.WorkflowUnloaded += runtime_WorkflowUnloaded; runtime.WorkflowSuspended += runtime_WorkflowSuspended; runtime.WorkflowCompleted += runtime_WorkflowCompleted; runtime.WorkflowAborted += runtime_WorkflowAborted; runtime.WorkflowTerminated += runtime_WorkflowTerminated; } } None of the events are triggered which only goes to say that the way I'm referencing the runtime instance in this particular scenario is wrong. Anyone know of a way to do this? Thanks in advance.

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  • WF4 workflow versioning using WorkflowServiceHost

    - by rwwilden
    Related to this question. I understand how to implement versioning of workflows using WorkflowApplication. If you keep the original XAML definition for older versions of your workflow around, you can load them using the right WorkflowApplication constructor. How could you ensure that WorkflowServiceHost uses the correct workflow definition when you want to host your workflows in IIS? There is a WorkflowServiceHost constructor that you can use to load a workflow definition, but when you are hosting inside IIS through a XAMLX file, you do not call WorkflowServiceHost yourself, this is handled somehow by IIS. So how do I ensure that the correct workflow definition is loaded for the right version of my workflow?

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  • Persistent workflow with durable delay activity hosted in ASP.NET

    - by Petr Felzmann
    The situation: a workflow hosted in ASP.NET application using WorkflowServiceHost and contains durable delay. The workflow is currently inside the delay activity and was persisted into database. Then the application pool, under which the ASP.NET application is running, goes to be recycled (e.g. by web.config change) and there are no more http requests to the ASP.NET application. And now is the time when delay activity should finish and next activity in the workflow should be executed. Does it mean the next activity will not be executed until any request to the ASP.NET application because the app pool was recycled?

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  • Loading persisted workflow after workflowdefinition has changed in WF4

    - by Flores
    How to solve this problem (in WF4): I create a workflow in xaml and start several instances of it, I have a persistancestore and all workflows persist on a bookmark half way their workflow. Now I stop the application If I restart te application everything is resumed, en nicely completes. But what if I want to change the workflow definition after the running instances persist? the only way to load the running workflows (that I was able to find) is the following way: WorkflowApplication wfapp = new WorkflowApplication(new WorkflowDefinition()); wfapp.InstanceStore = new SqlWorkflowInstanceStore(connStr); wfapp.Load(wfGuid); So you need the workflow definition, if it has changed during the persistance, things go horribly wrong. What is the best way to solve this?

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  • How do I access database from WF4?

    - by Patrol02
    Hi Guys, I host a wcf workflow service within my ASP.NET MVC2 application. I need to be able to load/save data inside my workflow (WF4). How it can be done? Should I just instantiate my Entity Framework context within my activities and read/write? Cheers.

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  • Host new WF4 workflows in appfabric

    - by racingcow
    Hello, I am new to using AppFabric to host WF services. I am trying to write a workflow admin application that will allow users to create xaml workflow definitions using the hosted WF4 designer, and then somehow allow those workflow defitions to be automatically deployed and hosted in AppFabric with the click of a button. I have the designer going, and I have read a couple of tutorials on how to host workflow services in AppFabric such as http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee677238.aspx, but my problem is how to deploy and host the workflow services via code. Does anyone know if this sort of "autodeploy/host" thing can be done with AppFabric? If so, could you point me in the right direction on this? -David

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  • Does WF4 have the ability to search for instances?

    - by racingcow
    Hello, I have a WF4 workflow service deployed in AppFabric. Is there any built-in way to do a generic search across all currently active workflow instances? For example, "get me a list of all active instances that have variable x = 5"? If someone could point me in the right direction on this it would be much appreciated.

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  • How can I drag and drop a xaml activity to a WF4 rehosted designer?

    - by Louis Rhys
    I understand that the WorkflowDesigner can receive a dragged item in several ways, for example: By dragging an item from the toolbox and dropping it on the designer: an empty activity of that type will be inserted on the designer at the drop location. One can also drag an activity from the designer and drop it on another location in the designer, the dragged activity will be inserted at the drop location as well. Is it possible that similar to these two drag and drop mechanism, I can drag a xaml activity to the designer? What I have in mind is this, Let's say you have a ListView containing several xaml files. I want to be able to drag one of the ListView items (ie one of the xaml files), and when I drag it over the designer it will act as if I drag something from the toolbox (except the activity will be supplied from the xaml). I know I can create a runtime Activity from the file by using ActivityXamlServices.Load(filename), and I want this activity to be inserted at the drop location. But how to tell the application to understand this when I drag and drop?

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  • Run WF 4.0 as a server-side component

    - by user184216
    Hi all, For a new project, we need to use WF 4.0 for deploying and running workflows. Instead of hosting workflows within the application itself, we decided to implement a server-side component that is in charge of running workflows. Before WF 4.0, one had explicit access to the the runtime engine (WorkflowRuntime), which provided some basic management functionalities, such as retrieving the workflows currently running etc ... As far as I could find out, WF 4.0 lacks this explicit access, as workflows are created via the WorkflowInstance class and no reference is immediately available to the WorkflowRuntime ... If I need these management functionalities on the server side, I'm a correct that I will need to implement these myself? Or did I miss out on something ... Thanks in advance for your answers!

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  • Trigger ad-hoc activity within a workflow

    - by Chris Taylor
    I am looking to use WF 4 to replace an existing workflow solution we have. One feature that is currently used in the existing workflow engine is the ability to cancel a current activity and loopback to a FlowSwitch type activity. So given the following crude workflow where we start at 'O' and base in the input data the workflow follows the path to 'A2' which is currently blocking on s bookmark waiting for input. ---------A1--\ | \ /\ \ O------- ---->--(A2)-------| ^ \/ / | | | / | | ---------A3--/ | | | |----------------------| However in the meantime some out of band data comes in that means we should cancel 'A2' and return to the FlowSwitch to re-evaluate based on the new data. The question is what is the best way to handle the out of band data that arrived? My initial guess is to have a Parallel activity with one branch waiting for out of band data and the other branch containing the workflow sequence described above. If data came in on the brach waiting for the out of band data, how would I cancel the current activity in the workflow and force it to return to the FlowSwitch. Or of course is there a better way to handle this. I have not actually done any work with the WF4 stuff for WF3 for that matter so I might be missing something obvious here.

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  • WF4RC, How to: Activity to Xaml?

    - by johnny g
    Hello all, I have Googled a bit, and cannot seem to find any examples of Xaml-fying Activities - good, bad, or otherwise! public static string ToXaml (this Activity activity) { // i would use ActivityXamlServices to go from Xaml // to activity, but how to go other way? documentation // is slim, and cannot infer proper usage of // ActivityXamlServices from Xml remarks :S string xaml = string.Empty; return xaml; } Hints, tips, pointers would be welcome :) NOTE: so found this. Will work through and update once working. Anyone wanna beat me to the punch, by all means. Better yet, if you can find a way to be rid of WorkflowDesigner, seems odd it is required.

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  • Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and things I wish were more intuitive

    - by pjohnson
    I've started using Windows Workflow Foundation, and so far ran into a few things that aren't incredibly obvious. Microsoft did a good job of providing a ton of samples, which is handy because you need them to get anywhere with WF. The docs are thin, so I've been bouncing between samples and downloadable labs to figure out how to implement various activities in a workflow. Code separation or not? You can create a workflow and activity in Visual Studio with or without code separation, i.e. just a .cs "Component" style object with a Designer.cs file, or a .xoml XML markup file with code behind (beside?) it. Absence any obvious advantage to one or the other, I used code separation for workflows and any complex custom activities, and without code separation for custom activities that just inherit from the Activity class and thus don't have anything special in the designer. So far, so good. Workflow Activity Library project type - What's the point of this separate project type? So far I don't see much advantage to keeping your custom activities in a separate project. I prefer to have as few projects as needed (and no fewer). The Designer's Toolbox window seems to find your custom activities just fine no matter where they are, and the debugging experience doesn't seem to be any different. Designer Properties - This is about the designer, and not specific to WF, but nevertheless something that's hindered me a lot more in WF than in Windows Forms or elsewhere. The Properties window does a good job of showing you property values when you hover the mouse over the values. But they don't do the same to find out what a control's type is. So maybe if I named all my activities "x1" and "x2" instead of helpful self-documenting names like "listenForStatusUpdate", then I could easily see enough of the type to determine what it is, but any names longer than those and all I get of the type is "System.Workflow.Act" or "System.Workflow.Compone". Even hitting the dropdown doesn't expand any wider, like the debugger quick watch "smart tag" popups do when you scroll through members. The only way I've found around this in VS 2008 is to widen the Properties dialog, losing precious designer real estate, then shrink it back down when you're done to see what you were doing. Really? WF Designer - This is about the designer, and I believe is specific to WF. I should be able to edit the XML in a .xoml file, or drag and drop using the designer. With WPF (at least in VS 2010 Ultimate), these are side by side, and changes to one instantly update the other. With WF, I have to right-click on the .xoml file, choose Open With, and pick XML Editor to edit the text. It looks like this is one way where WF didn't get the same attention WPF got during .NET Fx 3.0 development. Service - In the WF world, this is simply a class that talks to the workflow about things outside the workflow, not to be confused with how the term "service" is used in every other context I've seen in the Windows and .NET world, i.e. an executable that waits for events or requests from a client and services them (Windows service, web service, WCF service, etc.). ListenActivity - Such a great concept, yet so unintuitive. It seems you need at least two branches (EventDrivenActivity instances), one for your positive condition and one for a timeout. The positive condition has a HandleExternalEventActivity, and the timeout has a DelayActivity followed by however you want to handle the delay, e.g. a ThrowActivity. The timeout is simple enough; wiring up the HandleExternalEventActivity is where things get fun. You need to create a service (see above), and an interface for that service (this seems more complex than should be necessary--why not have activities just wire to a service directly?). And you need to create a custom EventArgs class that inherits from ExternalDataEventArgs--you can't create an ExternalDataEventArgs event handler directly, even if you don't need to add any more information to the event args, despite ExternalDataEventArgs not being marked as an abstract class, nor a compiler error nor warning nor any other indication that you're doing something wrong, until you run it and find that it always times out and get to check every place mentioned here to see why. Your interface and service need an event that consumes your custom EventArgs class, and a method to fire that event. You need to call that method from somewhere. Then you get to hope that you did everything just right, or that you can step through code in the debugger before your Delay timeout expires. Yes, it's as much fun as it sounds. TransactionScopeActivity - I had the bright idea of putting one in as a placeholder, then filling in the database updates later. That caused this error: The workflow hosting environment does not have a persistence service as required by an operation on the workflow instance "[GUID]". ...which is about as helpful as "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" and even more fun to debug. Google led me to this Microsoft Forums hit, and from there I figured out it didn't like that the activity had no children. Again, a Validator on TransactionScopeActivity would have pointed this out to me at design time, rather than handing me a nearly useless error at runtime. Easily enough, I disabled the activity and that fixed it. I still see huge potential in my work where WF could make things easier and more flexible, but there are some seriously rough edges at the moment. Maybe I'm just spoiled by how much easier and more intuitive development elsewhere in the .NET Framework is.

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  • Book &ldquo;Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter&rdquo; published

    - by terje
    During the summer and fall this year, me and my colleague Jakob Ehn has worked together on a book project that has now finally hit the stores! The title of the book is Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter and is published by Packt Publishing. Get it from http://www.packtpub.com/team-foundation-server-2012-starter/book or from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/1849688389                     The book is part of a concept that Packt have with starter-books, intended for people new to Team Foundation Server 2012 and who want a quick guideline to get it up and working.  It covers the fundamentals, from installing and configuring it, and how to use it with source control, work items and builds. It is done as a step-by-step guide, but also includes best practices advice in the different areas. It covers the use of both the on-premises and the TFS Services version. It also has a list of links and references in the end to the most relevant Visual Studio 2012 ALM sites. Our good friend and fellow ALM MVP Mathias Olausson have done the review of the book, thanks again Mathias! We hope the book fills the gap between the different online guide sites and the more advanced books that are out. Book Description Your quick start guide to TFS 2012, top features, and best practices with hands on examples Overview Install TFS 2012 from scratch Get up and running with your first project Streamline release cycles for maximum productivity In Detail Team Foundation Server 2012 is Microsoft's leading ALM tool, integrating source control, work item and process handling, build automation, and testing. This practical "Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter Guide" will provide you with clear step-by-step exercises covering all major aspects of the product. This is essential reading for anyone wishing to set up, organize, and use TFS server. This hands-on guide looks at the top features in Team Foundation Server 2012, starting with a quick installation guide and then moving into using it for your software development projects. Manage your team projects with Team Explorer, one of the many new features for 2012. Covering all the main features in source control to help you work more efficiently, including tools for branching and merging, we will delve into the Agile Planning Tools for planning your product and sprint backlogs. Learn to set up build automation, allowing your team to become faster, more streamlined, and ultimately more productive with this "Team Foundation Server 2012 Starter Guide". What you will learn from this book Install TFS 2012 on premise Access TFS Services in the cloud Quickly get started with a new project with product backlogs, source control, and build automation Work efficiently with source control using the top features Understand how the tools for branching and merging in TFS 2012 help you isolate work and teams Learn about the existing process templates, such as Visual Studio Scrum 2.0 Manage your product and sprint backlogs using the Agile planning tools Approach This Starter guide is a short, sharp introduction to Team Foundation Server 2012, covering everything you need to get up and running. Who this book is written for If you are a developer, project lead, tester, or IT administrator working with Team Foundation Server 2012 this guide will get you up to speed quickly and with minimal effort.

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