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I am pleased to announce the release of the first Cumulative Update (CU) for Workflow Manager 1.0; you can find the associated KB article here . The Workflow Manager CU has a dependency on Service Bus CU1 (KB is here ), which was also just released. There are a couple of options for the installation...

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 delivered a Workflow session at the //build/ conference yesterday. Slides and a recording of the presentation are now available ; it was a great opportunity to provide an update on all of our recent investments . It was a packed session with lots of good questions and discussions afterward. Thank...

(Intro: Sometimes as part of testing I go to silly lengths to try to point out what I think is going to be a bug in a piece of code I have seen. And frequently when I do this, I am basically wrong, for any of various reasons – it’s a bug according to some world view which is not quite aligned with reality...

Today I’m just advertising another MSDN blog that got circulated my way. This post may only going to make full sense if you’ve heard of OData already. If you’re heard of OData, and have been wondering what a good way to use it from workflow might be, I think you’ll find it good food for thought. http...

Today I was involved in a playful discussion about what would we do different about Workflow Designer if we could, and the question of ‘what do customers want?’ came up. I think there’s a lot that can change, but one of the ideas I can’t stay away from is improving Flowchart. For instance, searching...

We’ve been making significant investments in Workflow since the release of .NET 4, and now that we're starting to wrap up some of these investments, I thought it would be worthwhile to provide a summary. The work falls into 3 major areas: Improvements in Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET...

Dropping the stealth cloak a little, it’s time for some personal news about what I’ve been up to for the last year and a bit. And the answer is? Testing what we are calling in our docs “Workflow 1.0 Beta” (name may change) which is Microsoft’s new Workflow hosting product. Here’s a few quick facts about...

[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...

I’ve been publicizing for a while that Visual Studio 11 (still in Beta) supports C# expressions in workflow designer. Of course you might also possibly want to use C# or VB expressions by writing a workflow in code, instead of by building it in Visual Studio. There are actually a couple tricks to doing...

Although I haven’t used this feature in my regular work, I’ve known for a while that WF4.0 ships with a palette of activities designed to support distributed transactions. A distributed transaction is when you have a transaction, which is an atomic commit of a set of operations with a consistency guarantee...

[Edit 2/5/12: fixed spelling of 'ignorable' everywhere]. Or “What is this weird XAML I get from workflow designer that doesn’t look like ‘normal’ XAML?” (No ‘news’ today, just some WF4 olds in article format, and mostly implementation level trivia stuff...

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...

In .NET 4 the Workflow Team released an all new Workflow engine in the System.Activities namespace. This new Workflow technology, which we refer to as WF4, responded to key customer feedback by providing significant programming model, runtime, and authoring enhancements. With the release of .NET 4.5...

Today I stumbled upon another WF4 blog with some quality content, so here is my unsolicited and personal recommendation to - if you are thinking about the how-to-host aspects of WF4 - to take a few minutes gaining some insights on how and why WorkflowServiceHost can be a good building block for your...

If you’re exclusively using the Visual Studio workflow designer to design activities, you might go for a very long time (or forever) without discovering a particular System.Activities namespace, which is System.Activities.Expressions . The first reason you might never discover them is that none of the...

These questions (paraphrased) have come up a bunch of times so it’s not that hard to find the answer, but I just rediscovered them so it’s on topic for today. “I want to add a namespace to the Imports designer automatically at design time, so the user doesn’t have to do it manually. How can I do that...

There are many examples of binding ETB, but I notice they tend to be short on the details of why the example code looks as it does. Maybe it is because we are short on the ‘why’ that people can get a little lost once they want to do something other than the well-documented scenarios (e.g...

A little while I begin a new rehosted designer project, and this time I want to get a little bit more creative with it, mixing in some of the stuff I have done earlier with XAML compilation. The more functionality like that I add, the closer to the Visual Studio scenario the scenarios it is capable of...

One of the benefits of using WF4 to create workflow is that it provides a graphical workflow designer. This means in most of the cases, developers don’t need to write code to define their workflows. Instead, they can use the graphical workflow designer we provided. This can not only dramatically improve...

Introit - call it whatever, but today I’m recycling an old post. And I have one more little confession. When I started writing a new rehosted app today, I found out my old toolbox FAQ was fairly useless. It was even getting to the point where someone had to post this in the forum : “I found a number...

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...

One of our internal customers pinged me with a quick question today. He asked whether it is possible to set a default type argument for T if you have an activity of GenericType, say DataCollectorActivity<T>. I might have said this in passing by before but the answer is yes, the same technique is...

Hello State Machine fans! [Update I changed the title to this post, the old one doesn't really work. New readers - if I lost you already, have you come across the WF4 State Machine introductory materials ?] Since there have now been several eras of support for state machines in WF4 and WF3 , I think...