June, 2011

Over time a few folks have asked on the forum for information about writing rehosted visual workflow debugger applications (a.k.a. workflow simulator, a.k.a. visual workflow tracking…). Many of these folks have already seen the Visual Workflow Tracking sample (MSDN) , and even read at least one of Kushal’s related blog posts ( “Debugging in Workflow 4.0” , “VisualWorkflowTracking aka Workflow Simulator” , and “Visual Workflow Tracking with Step Service” ). But since it’s still a reasonably popular...

AsyncCodeActivity is a nice class for wrapping calls to asynchronous APIs and turning them into activities that can run super-efficiently. But! There are a few limitations to being a subclass of AsyncCodeActivity when compared to NativeActivity. Such as? Here’s a rough list: you can’t have any child activities you can’t create Execution Properties   you can’t create additional bookmarks Now there are two likely reasons the framework designers didn’t actually include an AsyncNativeActivity in...

Recently I noticed that I had automatically installed .Net Framework Platform Update 1 along with something else. So I should be able to use State Machine in my workflows now, right? Half right, half wrong! I forgot (and I am sure I am not the only one to forget this) that there are two parts to the Platform Update 1. The .Net framework assemblies and the Visual Studio enhancements (which require VS2010 SP1 ) are installed separately, and I only had the .Net framework assemblies installed, (And it...

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 ] ASP.NET Introducing new ASP.NET Universal Providers : Great post from Scott Hanselman on the new System.Web.Providers we are working on.  This release delivers new ASP.NET Membership, Role Management, Session, Profile providers that work with...

Today I had the pleasure of attending a brownbag (read ‘lunchtime presentation’) by Dustin Metzgar from the WF Performance team. He ran us through a slide deck with a lot of interesting performance comparisons between WF3 and WF4. Workflow Foundation 4.0 really is faster than Workflow Foundation 3.0 in a large variety of scenarios. For a technical discussion you can read about it in the WF4 performance white paper on MSDN . The most impressive performance gain in WF4 over WF3 is in raw runtime performance...