January, 2010

In regards to Toolbox, another common question I get is how can we get the Tooltips and icons for our custom activities. Well, quite simple actually: 1. Description attribute for the Tooltip 2. ToolboxBitmap attribute for the Icon Have both these attributes for your custom activity and once this activity appears in the Toolbox, you would have the tooltip on hover with the description and the icon you added. Of course, this is not just for the code activities, but can also be done for the custom declarative...

One of the very essential services while authoring Workflows is Undo-Redo. Common question asked is, how do we get the service outside of VS, in a re-hosted Workflow scenario. Well, in your re-hosted app(assuming it is WPF), it would be: Add the following command bindings: <Window.CommandBindings> <CommandBinding Command= "ApplicationCommands.Undo" Executed= "CommandBinding_UndoExecuted" /> <CommandBinding Command= "ApplicationCommands.Redo" Executed=...

This is the first in an occasional series highlighting some of the least discoverable features of the Workflow Designer. In this episode, we turn to the flowchart. The FlowDecision and FlowSwitch “activity” designers (they’re really items) have this cute little triangle in the top right hand corner. Hover over it, and you see the condition applied to the item. Click it, you can pin the expression to the flowchart so that it is always visible. “But isn’t there some way to pin all the expressions at...

In the previous two posts, we talked about the visual view on the Workflow tracking data and how we can have a restricted debugging experience in the re-hosted scenarios. Moving forward, the next question I get from customers - Is there a way I can show some kind of adorner on the designer when it executes a specific activity in addition to the debug adornment? Also, I want these adornments universal for Out of Box as well as Custom Activities. The adorner can be as simple as a check mark saying...

It has recently come to my attention that there is unrest regarding our inclusion of a CopyDirectory activity without a CopyFile activity. Therefore, I decided to take this opportunity to introduce everyone to the sub-class AsyncCodeActivity and how you can utilize it with a real world example – a cancelable file copy operation. As you may recall from my previous workflow posts, CodeActivity does provide a mechanism for cancelation while the AsyncCodeActivity does facilitate this need. If you are...