After a long period of inactivity, decided to get active again on the blogosphere. This time however, it’s not (just) going to be on BizTalk , (I’ve lately been through some “Identity crisis”… so) you will see me talking about how to protect your identity, get help through “Identity Federation”, asserting your identity, using “Proxies” etc. Also thought of creating a new Identity for myself here , instead of trying to regain my lost identity...

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...

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...