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Congratulations to Bayer White on his recently published book, Pro WF 4.5 ! Blog Post by: Jurgen Willis

Happy New Year! I’ve gotten a few requests for WF customer examples, so I thought I'd kick off 2013 with a list of some published case studies. These are case studies specific to the use of WF directly; there are numerous additional case studies for other Microsoft products that build on top...

We've updated our Workflow Developer Center on MSDN. We've simplified the design and refreshed the site with updated links. As part of this work, we've also pulled together a list of key WF samples. Our goal is for this to be a go-to site that aggregates key Workflow resources, including...

We have a new case study from one of our good partners, PayGlobal . The case study does a great job describing how WF contributes to their Exolvo solution. It also highlights the developer productivity gains that PayGlobal's consultants and customers are seeing from the Workflow designer enhancements...

Today we announced the RTM release of Workflow Manager 1.0, a new offering that builds on and extends the capabilities of WF 4.5. It's been an incredibly busy time for the team, and we're thrilled to get this release out to our customers, hot on the heels of our WF enhancements in .NET 4.5 ....

Leon Welicki, PM on the Workflow team, has written a great MSDN Magazine article covering the new WF features in .NET 4.5, including: Workflow Designer enhancements C# expressions Contract-first authoring of WCF Workflow Services Workflow versioning Dynamic update Partial trust Performance enhancements...

Recently we've received a few customer feedbacks reporting WF4 workflow designer would have bad performance or hang in some cases even when the workflow is relatively small. We've worked with customers and found out that it was actually a WPF issue. Good news is, the WPF team has already release...

tempuri.org is the default namespace applied to WCF Services and Workflow Services.  You can and should specify your service namespace. It is recommended that you explicitly specify a name and namespace for the service contract, and an action for each operation to avoid using " http://tempuri...

When I first saw NuGet I knew I had to find a way to take advantage of this great new way to deliver code to you.  It took a few months but finally the other day I decided to spend an afternoon working on a NuGet package for Microsoft.Activities.  Two and a half days later (isn’t that how it...

Humans Go to Control Panel / Programs / Programs and Features / View Installed Updates Use the Search Box to search the updates for KB2495593 KB2478063 Or if you prefer, search the list your self Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1 - Runtime Update Look for .NET Framework 4 Extended Look for...

Last year we at PDC10 we gave you a preview of the next release of Windows Workflow Foundation.  The video has just been posted to Channel 9. Windows Workflow Futures Speaker: Ron Jacobs Learn about the key investments we’re making in Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). See the WF improvements we...

How should you use WF4 and WCF with ASP.NET?  For this post I’ve created a really simple workflow and WCF service that delay for a specific amount of time and then return a value.  Then I created an ASP.NET page that I can use to invoke the workflow and WCF service to test their behavior The...

The following error might occur when an activity executes: The argument of type '<type>' cannot be used. Make sure that it is declared on an activity. If the type above refers to an implementation child, then it's possible that it's being created in the Execute method of the activity...

This refers to the previous version of Workflow, but it came up in a recent discussion, so I thought I'd share the relevant points. When developing a Workflow solution that uses persistence and tracking, you may wonder if you should run the scripts for both schemas on the same database, or create...

I’ve compiled a list of bloggers who seem to focus on WF4.0. Please post a comment if you have any blogs I’ve missed. Matt Winkler [MSFT] http://blogs.msdn.com/mwinkle/ Kushal Shah [MSFT] http://blogs.msdn.com/kushals/ Ron Jakobs [MSFT] http://blogs.msdn.com/rjacobs/ The Activity Designer [MSFT] http...

Now, the title is a bit cryptic, so let me elaborate; earlier this week, I noticed that when I tried to add a service reference to a WCF Workflow service in the same ASP.NET Web Application, I didn’t get the expected result; custom activities for the service operations in the toolbox (when designing...

We talked about WF4 Activity overview and WF parameters in particular in previous posts. In this installment, I'm going to focus on WF variables. Variable Variables are modeled by Variable class. namespace System.Activities { public abstract class Variable : LocationReference { public ActivityWithResult...

We are happy to announce that we have released the WF ADO.NET Activity Pack CTP1 on CodePlex . The WF ADO.NET Activity Pack CTP1 contains a set of WF 4 Activities based on .NET Framework Data Providers . These activities enable accessing a database through SQL commands or stored procedures within a workflow...

In the 1st segment , I talked about high level principle for WF4’s data model design. I’m going to talk about WF Argument in particular in this post. Argument We’ve briefly touched this before: in WF4, arguments are modeled by Argument class. namespace System.Activities { public abstract class Argument...

In previous blogs , we went through how define an Activity’s execution logic. But this is not enough. To build any meaningful Activity, developers also need to the activity’s state and data flow. In this post, I’m going to talk about WF4’s Activity data model. Argument and Variable 101 WF is just another...

In previous post I introduced WF 4's Activity model. In this section, I'm going to use 2 samples to demo 4 styles to create a custom Activity . How to build a leaf activity – HttpGet Today HTTP based RESTful services are getting popular, so it might be useful to perform some basic HTTP operations...

Workflow as Activities If you have programmed with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) , you should be very familiar with Activities . In WF , programs are defined by a tree of Activities . Some Activities are used to control the flow of program, like Sequence , If , and While ; some Activities perform...

In my last post , I covered using ActivityAction in order to provide a schematized callback, or hole, for the consumers of your activity to supply.  What I didn’t cover, and what I intend to here, is how to create a designer for that. If you’ve been following along, or have written a few designers...

A new programming language Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) 4.0 offers many features to simplify business application development, deployment and management. In this post I’d like to explore workflow from a developer’s angle as a new programming language. WF has a lot of “new” features compared to mainstream...

I wanted to put a quick note up as the team is starting to blog a little more frequently and putting some interesting content out there.  A few places to check out to hear from the folks on the team Endpoint – This is the general WF team blog, and has had some good posts Going to PDC? Want to Meet...