Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft’s unified programming model for building service-oriented applications. Windows Server AppFabric provides tools for managing and monitoring your web services and workflows. WCF HTTP Service is a service that can be accessed by a simple HTTP POST/GET request and can return responses in plain XML and in JSON formats. The AppFabric WCF HTTP Service template brings these two products together providing the following features: Monitor the calls...

When you create a new WorkflowConsole application you will see a line of code like this 1: WorkflowInvoker.Invoke( new Workflow1()); Looks innocent enough right? If you were only going to invoke this activity once this is not a problem.  But what if you were going to invoke this activity thousands of times? Suppose you wanted to use the activity in a WCF Service? What would the performance characteristic be? You need to understand what happens when you create and invoke an activity. There is...

I remember at PDC08 when Kenny Wolf was introducing WF4 he said a workflow is kind of like a college student.  Most of the time it lays around sleeping (and drinking beer) and occasionally it wakes up (when an assignment is due) and does a pulse of work and then goes back to sleeping and drinking beer.  Kenny called this a “pulse of work”, I like to call it a Workflow Episode. When you run a Workflow the activities will run until one of the following happens The workflow completes The workflow...

This morning while reviewing sample code I ran across the collection activities.  Working with these activities is fairly straightforward but there are some issues that you should be aware of that can impact the behavior of your workflow. These issues are familiar to .Net developers because they impact the basics of object equivalence and how the collection classes behave. However many workflow developers are building workflow activities that are meant to be used by non-developers. For this...

“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...