Tabular projects have a very simple structure. When you create a tabular project, you see two files in the Solution Explorer: TabularProject1.smproj and Model.bim. You are allowed only one .bim file per .smproj. Although you can sidecar whatever other files you like in your .smproj, such as text readme files, these other files cannot take a build action of Compile. Building a .smproj generates some more files. The build outputs go to the bin subfolder of the project folder. You get three files out...

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 used for activities such as ForEach<T>. The workflow designer will look for the attribute in the MetadataStore first before resorting to reflection, so there are 2 ways you can do it: 1. Quick...

In my post for tabular projects on the Analysis Services team blog , I gave a high-level overview of what tabular modeling is all about. That post gives a basic overview of how to get started writing models to be deployed to the VertiPaq engine. But how do the tools work? And why is the modeling experience so different from multidimensional (OLAP/UDM) models? Read on. When we set out to write the pro tools, we had an interesting challenge. We needed to create a fully functional modeling tool inside...

No matter how much I read about WCF in online forums and blog posts, I still couldn’t grasp the whole idea behind the extensibility model until I was able to play with it myself. What I discovered along the way is how the entire channel model works and how the binding and endpoint address fit into the equation. Although this may seem like I’m diving in details quickly, I personally find it very useful to illustrate real world scenarios to really show you the power of the API. On that note, I’d like...

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 it would be good to have information part historical stocktake, part making sure everyone is up-to-date (and a reminder to CTP users of CTP license terms), and so on, not so much for the regular readers...

[Or: Rant - Code-Reviewing Random Code on the Internet.] I’m sure I’ve stumbled upon this post before once, and I hit it again today. I think it’s a little unfortunate this appears so high up in the results, as the post has a bunch of problems. I don’t want to bash on it too hard, as it did one or two things that are nice. One is using IDisposable as a substitute for C# lock() statement when using ReaderWriteLockSlim. This is good. Both lock() and using(IDisposable) are prettier...

For one of my little projects at work, I’ve been creating a utility which will run as a child process which is just hosted as a console application. It prints a lot of output to console, and it would be kinda useful to be able to capture all the output from the child process, either in a text file, or by reading it in the parent process, or both. I know you can capture child process output in the parent process, or redirect it to a file by passing in a file handle to the CreateProcess API. However...

This blog is back. Some time ago, I left the Workflow Designer team and joined the SQL Server Analysis Services team. Immediately, we got busy with SQL Server Denali. With no public release of the stuff I was working on, I (rather uncharacteristically) didn't have much to say, so I let this blog die off. Now things have changed. SQL Server Denali CTP3 is forthcoming, and with that is the first public CTP with major new Analysis Services functionality. The vision and roadmap post gives you a taste...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The (awesome) UK developer community is holding another all day event with Steve Sanderson and me in London on June 6th.  The event is free to attend, and the venue will be in Central London (at the ODEON Covent Garden).  The website for the event is here . Content The event goes from 9am to 5pm, and will feature a bunch of great .NET content.  The current agenda includes the following talks: Build an app using ASP.NET MVC 3, EF Code First, NuGet and IIS Express (ScottGu) We'll...

Next month I’ll be in Europe giving presentations at some great .NET conferences.   Below are details on the three conferences I’m presenting at: Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC 2011) I’ll be in Oslo, Norway for the NDC 2011 conference (June 8th to 10th).  I’ve heard really great things about NDC – I’m excited to be able to finally attend in person!  I’m doing a keynote talk, two breakout talks, and an unplugged Q&A session. Details on NDC can be found here . Microsoft...

Over the last year you’ve heard us talking about both Windows Azure AppFabric and Windows Server AppFabric.  Today we are adding our final post to the .NET endpoint team blog and announcing the new AppFabric Team blog .  This blog will be the home of content about all things AppFabric from Service Bus to Caching to WCF and WF. If you’ve been following us here on the .NET Endpoint please be sure to follow the AppFabric Team Blog . Blog Post by: Ron Jacobs

We’ve recently published some great end-to-end ASP.NET video training courses on the http://asp.net web-site.  Created by Pluralsight (a great .NET training company), these video courses are available free of charge and provide a great way to learn (or brush-up your knowledge of) ASP.NET Web Forms 4 and ASP.NET MVC 3.  Each course is taught by a single trainer, and provides a nice end-to-end curriculum (from basic concepts to working with the new Entity Framework “code first” model to security...

A few folks have been asking if it is possible to serialize/deserialize using the DataContractSerializer. Rest assured, yes it is possible. Now whether or not it is the easiest/most intuitive model well that it is a different question. If you read to the end the post you will see a bunch of extensions which have been pushed to webapicontrib and make this all MUCH easier (at least I think). If you don’t jump you’ll read below what you need to do if you do it yourself. It stars with the SetSerializer<T>...

ASP.NET MVC 3 supports a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to continuing to support/enhance the existing .aspx view engine).  Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, with Razor you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code...

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.org" and to prevent interface and method names from being exposed in the service’s contract MSDN Library - Service Contract Versioning Where is tempuri.org in the WSDL? If you browse the service...