June, 2012

[Minor disclaimer: content in this post is based upon a non-final release candidate build of .Net 4.5] The workflow designer team had two slightly conflicting goals to tackle in .Net 4.5. Goal one: Make Workflow Designer more awesome for everyone in .Net 4.5. It should be easier to use, it should look better, and it should let you do some cool new things that will just never work in 4.0. Goal two: Be completely backwards compatible for applications build on .Net 4.0. This second goal is a very important...

A few folks have asked, so I decided to put the data in one place. We'll be talking more about Hadoop at TechEd North America and Hadoop Summit next week, and then later in the month at TechEd Europe . Here are the sessions we're presenting: TechEd ( NA and Europe , links are to NA sessions) Learn Big Data Application Development on Windows Azure -- Wenming Ye Web 2.0 companies have been fully taking advantage of Hadoop based open source tools to tackle Big Data needs. Microsoft now offers...

One of WF’s usability problems in the .Net 4.0 release was the complexity of creating custom ActivityDesigner classes for working with custom activities that expose ActivityAction or ActivityFunc properties . (If you’re wondering what ActivityAction or ActivityFunc are, step this way. ) Although the WF team went to great effort to try to be helpful in documenting how to do this, the reality was still that implementing custom designers for activity delegates still would take a lot of time and patience...

Here are set of videos recently I did on this topic. Video 1. A quick Tour of Office 365 Video 2. Public web site created with SharePoint Online Video 3. Using SQL Azure from SharePoint On Premise   Video 4. Using Silverlight & SQL Azure in SharePoint Video 5. SharePoint calling an Azure Web Service [...] Blog Post by: sergeluca

Today we are releasing a major set of improvements to Windows Azure.  Below is a short-summary of just a few of them: New Admin Portal and Command Line Tools Today’s release comes with a new Windows Azure portal that will enable you to manage all features and services offered on Windows Azure in a seamless, integrated way.  It is very fast and fluid, supports filtering and sorting (making it much easier to use for large deployments), works on all browsers, and offers a lot of great new...

  It looks like many juniors we are hiring don’t feel very familiar with Use Cases; there is a direct link between use cases and Stories in Agile. Here is a quick introduction to Use cases in French (English version is coming up) I want to share to the community Blog Post by: sergeluca

As many of you might know, I’ve spent much of my time the past 12 months working on Windows Azure – which is Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Platform (I also continue to run the teams that build ASP.NET, the server framework libraries of .NET, and a few other products too). I will be doing a keynote in San Francisco this Thursday, June 7th at 1pm PDT.  The event will be streamed live , and I hope you’ll be able to join us as we walkthrough some of the exciting work we’ve been doing – and how you...

When using VB Workflow projects in Visual Studio 2012 RC, you may receive a System.InvalidCastException while editing expressions. The Exception message would be similar to the following: An exception has been encountered. This may be caused by an extension. You can get more information by examining the file 'C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\ActivityLog.xml'. After closing the exception, IntelliSense will stop working in your VB expressions. However, you can still...

I recently blogged about a big wave of improvements we recently released for Windows Azure.  I also delivered a keynote on June 7th that discussed and demoed the enhancements – you can watch a recorded version of it online . Over the next few weeks I’ll be doing several more speaking events about Windows Azure in North America and Europe.  Below are details on some of the upcoming the events and how you can sign-up to attend one in person: Scottsdale, Arizona on June 19th, 2012 Attend this...

Recently saw this question in the MSDN Workflow Forum Is there a (SetState) in the new StateMachine Activity? Many users of Workflow in .NET 3.5 took advantage of the StateMachineWorkflowInstance class to determine what state a workflow is in, and also to force it to a new state.  Some people use this class as a way to enable/disable controls in the UI of an application. I recall a conversation I had with some developers from a bank that wrote an application for their tellers that used this...