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People have been wondering for a while what the future of WF3 was since the release of WF4. So far both workflow stacks have coexisted in .NET 4 and there has been no official statement about the future of the older WF3 stack.   That has just changed! The workflow team at Microsoft has just announced...

This is the 3rd post about what is new with Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.5 as announced at the //build/ conference. See also part 1 about the designer enhancements and part 2 about the other runtime enhancements.   This 3rd post is about one of the biggest missing pieces which is versioning...

During the last //build/ conference a number of new WF4.5 features where announced. In part 1 I took a look at the designer improvements, in this blog post I am going to take a look at some of the runtime enhancements.   New activities. As part of WF 4.5 we will see some new activities in the box...

During the last //build/ conference a number of new WF4, or should I now say WF4.5, features where announced. While the list of new features isn’t earth shattering long some of the most annoying shortcomings where addressed.   Designer enhancements As a developer I spend a lot of time in the designer...

For those that attended the Guerrilla Enterprise .NET course last week in Copenhagen and didn't get a change to download all the sample you can download all the demos Richard Blewett, Dominick Baier and I wrote from here . And thanks for being there, it was a fun event :) Blog Post by: Maurice

Some time ago I blogged about how to get the SqlWorkflowInstanceStore working with SQL Azure. In order for this to work we had to make a few changes to the SqlWorkflowInstanceStoreSchema.sql script and as a result we ended up in a working but officially not supported scenario. And while this worked just...

Lots of people like to use the state machine model workflow as this is a very flexible way of working that often fits in with how real work processes work. With WF3 we had a state machine workflow but with WF4 this was not ready in time and as a result we didn’t get to use this model. There where a few...

A question on StackOverflow about scheduling child activities with some additional input parameters made me remember that this is kind on not obvious to figure out and even though I new the answer I had to think hard before I could code up a demo. So I figured I might as well post it on my blog for future...

Today I did a fun presentation at the Engineering World Conference in the Netherlands on using the Windows Phone 7 with a Workflow Service hosted on Windows Azure. The sample application, that is complete with all source on CodePlex over here , consists of an expense app on the phone and an ASP.NET MVC...

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...

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...

Ken Levy recently interviewed me for CodeCast on the state of Windows Workflow Foundation 4 and the AppFabric for hosting your workflow services. Its episode 99, I wonder what they are planning for episode 100. You can download the episode here or through iTunes.   Enjoy! www.TheProblemSolver.nl...

The WorkflowApplication is a great way to execute your workflows in process. Usually the fact that the WorkflowApplication is asynchronous is a great thing but there are cases when a little more synchronous execution is nice. For example executing a workflow and updating the state of the user interface...

Sometimes you just don’t want to do an Add Service reference in the client application but still be able to to call a WF4 workflow service. The good thing is that a WF4 workflow service is just another WCF service from the client perspective so almost everything you can do with a regular WCF service...

Ron Jacobs showed a number of really cool new workflow features we can be expecting in the next version of Windows Workflow Foundation during the last PDC in Redmond and Tech-Ed Europe in Berlin . One of the new features he demonstrated where the activities we can use to load data from a SQL server database...

Windows Workflow Foundation 4 makes it real easy to create workflow services that do long running work on a server. However when we are doing long running work there could be an issue with lots of workflows being started and too many workflow instances competing for the same data and threads thereby...

In my previous WF4 post I described the principal of how to version workflow services using the WCF 4 RoutingService. In that post I described the general problem and solution without going into a lot of detail and showing any code. In this blog post I will add an actual implementation you can use for...

One of the problems with the current version of Windows Workflow Foundation is how to handle different versions of your workflows. With short running workflows this is no big deal, workflows do whatever they are supposed to do and finish, and you can deploy a newer updated version of your XAMLX files...

In my previous blog post I demonstrated how to secure a workflow service using the Windows Identity Foundation. With this in place we only allow users that are trusted by the STS Dominick Baier wrote. That is nice but in some cases we might not want all users to be able to perform all actions.  ...

The way security is often still handled these days with each application keeping track of their own users is somewhat dated. Some form of Federated security, where a single separate server is responsible for the security of a whole series of applications, is the way to go. On the internet there are plenty...

Troubleshooting applications in production is always a challenge. With AppFabric monitoring your workflows and services, you get great information about exactly what is happening, including notices about unhandled exceptions. In this episode, Michael...( read more ) Blog Post by: The .NET Endpoint :...

When VS 10 RC/.Net Framework 4 RC is installed, the previous version of VS 10 Beta2/.Net Framework 4 Beta2 is uninstalled. If you have Windows Server AppFabric Beta1 installed (Shows up as “Application Server Extensions for .NET4” on the machine that it has been installed), ideally you would uninstall...

Read all about the new features here or just download it here . Blog Post by: mikekre

In our previous post, we discussed the topic of Monitoring Applications using Windows Server AppFabric. In this post, we will show how to use the same tools in more advanced ways to troubleshoot problems in your applications. Introduction The previous post introduced the AppFabric Dashboard (pictured...

This post aims to provide you with an introduction into monitoring the health and activity of your WCF- and WF-based applications with Windows Server AppFabric. More specifically, the post will outline the AppFabric tooling features that are built into IIS Manager as well as outline some basic strategies...