February, 2011

(Foreword: I tried to write one article about Extensions already, but what I produced could possibly be considered too condensed. For my encore, here is the longer, more explicit version with some actual hosting code to look at, and that also gives you a general idea of how to use bookmarks in custom activities. Feedback in the form of comments is always appreciated [and moderated for spam filtering].) Much like sliced bread, workflow hosting extensions are a great idea . However, it is not necessarily...

Pluralsight (a great .NET training company) is offering the opportunity to watch their jQuery Fundamentals course for free for the next 36 hours. The course is presented by the most excellent Dan Wahlin and contains 5 hours of great end to end content.  Pluralsight will be offering this jQuery Fundamentals course for free until Thursday evening (9pm PST). Pluralsight has about 100 other great training courses available similar to this one.  They recently launched a new subscription plan...

Earlier this month the ASP.NET MVC developer community held the 2nd annual mvcConf event .  This was a free, online conference focused on ASP.NET MVC – with more than 27 talks that covered a wide variety of ASP.NET MVC topics.  Almost all of the talks were presented by developers within the community, and the quality and topic diversity of the talks was fantastic. Below are links to free recordings of the talks that you can watch (and optionally download): Scott Guthrie Keynote The NuGet...

(Or: [not] using XAML Build Task in a rehosted scenario.) Motivated by some old , less old , and recent forum threads about allowing compositional workflows in a rehosted designer scenario, with the ability to reuse activities created in XAML, I have finally played through some options for building assemblies directly from rehosted designer XAML. First though, let’s look at the standard option for compiling workflow assemblies. What normally happens when you build XAML files in an Activity Library...

This past weekend the ASP.NET team released NuGet 1.1 .  Phil Haack recently blogged a bunch of details on the enhancements it brings, as well as how to update to it if you already have NuGet 1.0 installed.  It is definitely a nice update (my favorite improvement is that it no longer blocks the UI when downloading packages). Read Phil’s blog post about the NuGet 1.1 update and how it install it here .  NuGet is Not just for Web Projects NuGet is not just for ASP.NET projects – it supports...

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...

For background: in ContextBoundObject #1 – Creating Contexts we started reverse engineering SynchronizationAttribute to figure out how to create Contexts for ContextBoundObjects . Creating a Context was fairly easy and… on it’s own useless. Yes, a context possibly got created, but does that do anything on its own? Not really. At this stage it’s like we created a filter which is all holes and lets everything fall through. What does it take to actually do something when cross-context calls occur? Looking...

The Virtual ASP.NET MVC Conference (MVCConf) happened earlier today.  Several thousand developers attended the event online, and had the opportunity to watch 27 great talks presented by the community. All of the live presentations were recorded, and videos of them will be posted shortly so that everyone can watch them (for free).  I’ll do a blog post with links to them once they are available. Special Pluralsight Training Available for Next 48 Hours In my MVCConf keynote this morning, I...

MDBG is, briefly, a sample managed library for writing debuggers which uses COM interop and the CLR hosting debugger APIs ( ICorDebug interface etc.). As far as I can find, the most recent version of the MDB sample is still the .net 2.0 version, which doesn’t work for hosting .net 4.0 applications. When I say doesn’t work, I mean in a somewhat subtle, non-obvious way, as in fact everything appears to work fine at first, you can indeed fire up a debuggee process, and you can indeed receive the ‘process...

[Deviation from WF posting again.] Sometimes you learn enough about something just well enough to write some code that is useful. A month later, you wake and say… ‘but I still don’t really feel like I know what is going on.’ Today is such a day to clear my head - today that something is ContextBoundObject. So far, I have a vague or general idea what ContextBoundObject is supposed to do – what I lack is details! So I’m going to start teaching myself. Obligatory disclaimer: I may work at MS but, in...

Here is the latest in my link-listing series .  Also check out my Best of 2010 Summary for links to 100+ other posts I’ve done in the last year. [I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] Community News MVCConf Conference Next Tuesday : Attend the free, online ASP.NET MVC Conference being organized by the community next Tuesday.  Here is a list of some of the talks you can watch live. Visual Studio HTML5 and CSS3 in VS 2010 SP1...