As shown previously it isn’t hard to run Workflow Services on Windows Azure. In fact all we need to do is add a bit of extra configuration and we can work as normal. However normally when I am hosting long running workflows in IIS I always add a SqlWorkflowInstanceStore  to store the workflow state when it is not running so we can survive the inevitable IIS AppDomain restarts. Unfortunately this isn’t quite as straightforward as I had hoped.   SQL Azure != SQL Server The important thing...

“The important point is that our test can’t control what that dependency returns to our code under test or how it behaves (if we wanted to simulate an exception, for example). That’s when we use stubs .” – The Art of Unit Testing - Roy Osherove, Yesterday morning I received an email from Ryo in Belgium who asked for help in unit testing a workflow. Ryo had read my previous posts on Microsoft.Activities.UnitTesting .XamlInjector and wanted to use it to test his workflow...

Read this article on InformationWeek to learn how customers are benefitting already today from cloud computing. More specifically, this article highlights one of our customers, NVoicePay, that makes use of Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus and Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control, as well as SQL Azure, as part of their solution. Here is a quote from the article on the benefits of using cloud computing: CTO Shaun McAravey predicts NVoicePay will be handling $250 million in annual invoice payments...

Windows Azure might not support the WCF and WF4 hosting parts of Windows AppFabric bit that doesn’t mean you can’t run workflow services on Windows Azure. After all a workflow is just a .NET 4 type and Windows Azure runs the .NET framework. As a result running a workflow service is quite easy once you know how to configure it.   The web.config file The first problem is that the machine web.config of an Azure virtual machine is different than that on a regular machine. As a result, by default...

In my previous previous post on the WCF Fault Spike and the other post on 4 Tenets of Service Oriented Data Validation I discussed some options and best practices for service data validation with WCF.  In this post I want to consider how the same scenario applies to WF4. Download Sample Code – WCF Service Fault and Validation Example I created an application that ran three scenarios each resulting in an exception thrown from the service and a web UI page then shows what the sender can do based...