January, 2011

“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 but was having trouble...

When the new Web Platform Installer (3.0) was released I had trouble finding Windows Server AppFabric.  The new UI can be a little confusing so to save you some trouble here are the instructions for installing Windows Server AppFabric. The Simple Way Use this link it will launch the web platform installer and just install it. The Web Platform Installer UI Go to http://www.microsoft.com/web and download then run the Web Platform Installer In the search box type AppFabric and press enter The search...

Remember the 4 tenets of SOA?  One of them is that Boundaries are explicit.  When somebody sends data to your service it is just like when you cross an international border into another country.  Just a couple of hours drive north of us in Redmond is the border crossing to Canada.  When you cross into Canada or back into the United States you have to stop your car and the border agents do their job.  Their job is to make sure that you have proper documentation and that you...

Ready to have some fun? Today I spent the day investigating WCF FaulContracts and FaultException and some best practices for argument validation.  I’m going to do the same in a future post on Workflow Services but I felt it best to really understand the topic from a WCF point of view first. Investigation Questions What happens when a service throws an exception? What happens if a service throws a FaultException? What happens if the service operation includes a FaultContract and it throws a FaultException<TDetail>...

With the work I’ve been doing on versioning I’ve had to write unit tests that verify the behavior I expect from the helper classes in Microsoft.Activities.dll .  If you want to verify that your assembly versioning strategy is working correctly you may have to do similar testing.  This sort of testing is tricky… in this post I’ll share with you my solutions to some tough problems. Test Problem: Multiple Versions of the Same Assembly in a Test Run There is only one deployment directory for...

In my previous post , I’ve been exploring how changing the version of an ActivityLibrary affects a workflow.  In this post I want to explore how Workflow Services behave. The good news – as far as I can tell, they behave exactly as they should behave loading the assembly version they were built with.  For this test I have a Workflow Service that uses an activity from ActivityLibrary1 and we will run through a similar set of scenarios deploying a Workflow Service (.xamlx) to a web site hosted...

In my last post I showed you how the _XamlStaticHelper class uses different semantics when loading assemblies referenced by XAML files. Today I’m going to show you a solution I’ve built into the Microsoft.Activities library that can help you apply standard CLR behavior when loading referenced assemblies. endpoint.tv - How To Make WF4 Load the Assemblies You Really Want   Strict Assembly Resolution for Compiled Workflows Step 1: Download and reference Microsoft.Activities.dll Download the latest...

In agile software development , a spike is a story that cannot be estimated until a development team runs a timebox ed investigation. The output of a spike story is an estimate for the original story. - SearchSoftwareQuality.com Definitions Update 1/8/2011: For a solution to these problems see this post .  Special thanks to Krisragh for his help with this post. For this spike I want to answer the following questions What happens when a V1 workflow loads a V2 activity? What happens when a V2...

I couldn't leave this one alone. While I was making the last episode I said that there was possibly another strategy for detecting states and transitions and that was to use Tracking data. In this episode I'll show you a better way to implement our WPF UI using the Model View View-Model (MVVM) pattern that does not require the state machine to have actvitivities to notify the model of state changes. The source including some really cool unit tests that make use of Microsoft.Activities.UnitTesting...

Update : You can download an audio version of the below talk here . Tomorrow (Monday Jan 24th) I’m doing another online LIDNUG session .  The talk will be from 3:00pm to 4:30pm (Pacific Time).  I do these talks a few times a year and they tend to be pretty fun.  Attendees can ask any questions they want to me, and listen to me answer them live via LiveMeeting.  We usually end up having some really good discussions on a wide variety of topics.  Any topic is fair game: technical...

The IIS team recently published the Microsoft Web Farm Framework 2.0 release to the web.  You can learn more about it and download the final V2 release of it here . What is the Web Farm Framework? The Microsoft Web Farm Framework is a free, fully supported, Microsoft product that enables you to easily provision and mange a farm of web servers.  It enables you to automate the installation and configuration of platform components across the server farm, and enables you to automatically synchronize...

Last week we released several new web products – including ASP.NET MVC 3 .  We’ve had a bunch of great feedback and a ton of downloads since then. One question a few people have asked me recently is: “My web hosting provider doesn’t yet support ASP.NET MVC 3 - any idea when they will install it?” The good news is that you don’t need to wait for them to install anything on their web-servers.  As long as your web hosting provider supports .NET 4, then you can build and deploy ASP.NET MVC...

I’m excited to announce the release today of several products: ASP.NET MVC 3 NuGet IIS Express 7.5 SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Orchard 1.0 WebMatrix 1.0 The above products are all free. They build upon the .NET 4 and VS 2010 release, and add a ton of additional value to ASP.NET (both Web Forms and MVC) and the Microsoft Web Server stack. ASP.NET MVC 3 Today we are shipping the final release of ASP.NET MVC 3.  You can download and install ASP.NET MVC 3 here...

Last month we released the Beta of VS 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1).  You can learn more about the VS 2010 SP1 Beta from Jason Zander’s two blog posts about it, and from Scott Hanselman’s blog post that covers some of the new capabilities enabled with it.   You can download and install the VS 2010 SP1 Beta here . Last week I blogged about the new Visual Studio support for IIS Express that we are adding with VS 2010 SP1. In today’s post I’m going to talk about the new VS 2010 SP1 tooling...

Last month we released the VS 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Beta.  You can learn more about the VS 2010 SP1 Beta from Jason Zander’s two blog posts about it, and from Scott Hanselman’s blog post that covers some of the new capabilities enabled with it.  You can download and install the VS 2010 SP1 Beta here . IIS Express Earlier this summer I blogged about IIS Express .  IIS Express is a free version of IIS 7.5 that is optimized for developer scenarios.  We think it combines the ease...

I hope everyone is having a Happy New Years! 2010 has been a busy blogging year for me (this is the 100th blog post I’ve done in 2010).  Several people this week suggested I put together a summary post listing/organizing my favorite posts from the year.  Below is a quick listing of some of my favorite posts organized by topic area: VS 2010 and .NET 4 Below is a series of posts I wrote (some in late 2009) about the VS 2010 and .NET 4 (including ASP.NET 4 and WPF 4) release we shipped in...

There's not a lot of guidance out there on how to secure your Workflow Services using AD FS, nor that give you some cool ideas of how to leverage the two together (including how to leverage multiple attribute stores). Check...

If you are curious as to how to run WF 4 in Azure (Web and Worker Roles and hybrid scenarios), check out this article over at the AppFabric CAT's blog, and while you're there drop some feedback: Running .NET 4...

The San Diego .NET Architecture SIG will be having an awesome speaker present on Windows Azure. Come join me for an enlightening evening Thurs 1/20, 6:00-8:30 pm at the San Diego Microsoft Office. See http://www.sandiegodotnet.com for details.

Can Azure worker roles host a service at the root? http://app.cloudapp.net:5555 ? Or do you need something hanging off it: http://app.cloudapp.net:5555/Service1 ? A: You can host directly at the root. Why is there guidance that says the security mode has...