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As you’ve seen in a previous post, we have added a lot of new features in WF 4.5; see this article for more discussion of those features. A number of those features (e.g. annotations, auto-surround with sequence, etc.) were developed to improve the authoring experience of workflows. Many of our...

I don’t remember anyone ever actually asking me this, but I found myself wondering the question while rustling up a quick rehosting app. Foreach<> activity lets you change the TypeArgument dynamically via the property grid. But FlowSwitch<> doesn’t. Why? As usual, although it take a while...

Hi all, I’m back, and apologize for the delay, things have been crazy here and I’ve taken a little time off following shipping VS2010, so I’m getting back into it.  I’d like to talk about one of my favorite late additions to the WF4 designer programming model.  We added this change sometime...

Continuing with the theme of questions we get from customers: How can we store some specific information into activity. One of the cases might be since we don't provide a unique identifier for an activity, the developer wants to store the unique ids per activity. This way he can differentiate between...

We have already seen how to have icons for the toolbox items. However, unfortunately, it is not the same way for the icons on the designer surface. Good news though, it is not that difficult. As we create our ActivityDesigner, we essentially need to add the following property: < sap:ActivityDesigner...

Today, for a re-hosted application, generally users have the Designer, Toolbox and the Property Grid. The property grid provided has been hooked up pretty well with the designer. Thus any changes to the properties of an activity on the designer surface are bound pretty tightly with the property grid...

Recently, a customer asked how can we get the designer in focus if we know the Model Item for that activity. This can specifically be of value as you are working with large workflows and huge scrolling for going from top to the bottom. This can now be achieved pretty simple: modelItem.Focus(); Thus,...

Scenario: A BA starts with the Workflow authoring using the Re-hosted workflow designer and the Toolbox activities provided in the palette. At some point, the BA figures out that the Toolbox doesn't contain an activity that he is looking for. Only option that the BA has for him is to work offline...

In the series, the next question we generally get is, How about Validations. How can I have one set of validations for Devs in VS only and another set for BAs in a non-VS environment. To demonstrate that, again I have developed it on top of the sample application we saw in the previous post. In here...

One of the selling points with Workflows is customers have been able to customize the Workflows and can have a collaborative work between the BAs and Developers. BAs define the business process using the Re-hosted Workflow designer and the dev fine tunes/completes the implementation by taking the Workflow...

In the re-hosted scenario, as part of customizations that domain specific users want – we have been asked many times as to how can we not show the toolbar at the bottom of the designer or show only specific items in that toolbar? Internally we refer to it as the Shellbar as well and the API to go about...

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>...

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...

In the last post, we went through the SDK sample where we saw how to use the Designer and the Debugger APIs to understand the workflow execution logic outside of VS in a visual manner. This is certainly one step above the textual tracking records received and making a sense out of it. We will now go...

This part 6 of my 6 part series on the EditingContext. Introduction Sharing Functionality between Designers Host provided capabilities Providing callbacks for the host Subscription/Notification engine Inspection, Default Services and Items (you are here) I want to wrap up this series of posts by posting...

In the Beta2 SDK, we shipped a sample called WorkflowSimulator. Essentially, the sample is using the tracking APIs to have a visual understanding of the Workflow execution logic. Thus, as we hit “Run Workflow”, we get the debug kind of adornments on each activity that executed. Let’s actually dwell deeper...

I’ve been meaning to throw together some thoughts on attached properties and how they can be used within the designer.  Basically, you can think about attached properties as injecting some additional “stuff” onto an instance that you can use elsewhere in your code. Motivation In the designer, we...

A comment posted by Notre asked for some more details about view state and attached property services, so I thought I would dive into those next.  I will follow-up in a subsequent post on the AttachedPropertyService, as there is a little bit more going on there. Motivation Why do I care about viewstate...

A couple of customers have asked this one, as they work with the Programming Model, how do I know if an activity has been drag-dropped vs Copy-Pasted vs an Undo-Redo happened. How do the customers use it? Well, for one of them they wanted to change the name of the activity if it is a Copy-Paste as against...

One of the most commonly used designers and generally the root is the Sequence activity. Of course, we spent some amount of time adding the animation and styling to the the Sequence Activity Designer. However, due to a number of reasons(costs mainly), the activity designer is internal. However, the good...

As part of workflow authoring, it is always the case where the customer says, I like your out of box activity, however it has too many arguments/properties. I don't want to ask my user to set all these properties. And hence, now I would need to write a custom activity which has some of these properties...

Lets talk about a couple of common customer scenarios/questions that I have encountered till date. 1. Workflow authors want to use the generic activities such that they can start with Activity<Object> and then dynamically without having to replace the activity on the canvas want it to be changed...