This morning we released a number of enhancements to Windows Azure.  These new capabilities include: Mobile Services (job scheduler support, Europe Region Support, Command Line Support) Web Sites (scale improvements, integrated source control) SQL Data Sync (support in the new HTML portal) ACS Management (support in the new HTML portal) Media Services (job and task management, blob storage support, reserved compute) Virtual Network enhancements Subscription Filtering Support Windows Azure Store...

Earlier this week I blogged about the new ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update that we shipped last month.  In today’s blog post I’m going to go into more detail about two of the cool new features it brings: Built-in support for EF 4.1 (which includes the new EF “code-first” support) Built-in data scaffolding support within Visual Studio (which enables you to rapidly create data-driven sites) These two features provide a really sweet, and extremely powerful, way to work with data and build data-driven...

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 of posts online about how to populate a toolbox with the standard activities/icons. Unfortunately they are all wrong in one way or another. Some add internal non user tools, some get the wrong icons,...

State machine is a well-known model for event-driven workflows and a highly requested feature from our WF4 users, especially those looking to move their WF3 State Machine workflows to WF4. We are very pleased to provide a new, fully-supported, WF4 State Machine including runtime and designer in the .Net Framework Platform Update 1 release ( KB2495638 ). This release enables customers to model their event-driven processes as a state machine using a simplified API and designer experience. Thanks to...

A few weeks ago I blogged about a great ASP.NET MVC 3 video training course from Pluralsight that was made available for free for 48 hours for people to watch.  The feedback from the people that had a chance to watch it was really fantastic.  We also received feedback from people who really wanted to watch it – but unfortunately weren’t able to within the 48 hour window. The good news is that we’ve worked with Pluralsight to make the course available for free again until March 18th. ...

Sometimes it happens that via the forums I learn about a new (to me) beast in the WF Zoo. Today that animal is WorkflowDataContext . The MSDN document is fairly terse: “Represents the data context of the current workflow environment and provides a bridge to bring workflow arguments and variables into the scope of data binding.” Putting that into everyday WF terms, how would you actually use one of these?   Application 1: Reading Variable and Argument Values from inside a CodeActivity  ...

Most of the Windows Workflow Foundation samples use workflows that are hosted in a console application, but this isn't a realistic scenario for real-world workflows. Workflows in actual business applications will be hosted in persistent processes- either a Windows service authored by the developer, or a server application such as IIS or AppFabric. The differences between these approaches are as follows. Hosting workflows in IIS with Windows AppFabric Using IIS with AppFabric is the preferred...

A few customers have noticed an issue with WCF scaling up when handling a burst of requests. Fortunately, there is a very simple workaround for this problem that is covered in KB2538826 (thanks to David Lamb for the investigation and write up). The KB article provides a lot of good information about when this would apply to your application and what to do to fix it. In this post, I want to explore exactly what's happening. The best part is that there is an easy way to reproduce the problem. To...

.NET 4.0 and WF 4.0 include a new event-driven control flow activity called Pick that takes the place of the original Listen activity in .NET 3.x. Whereas the branches in the Listen activity may be triggered only by activities that implement the IEventActivity interface, the branches in a Pick activity may be triggered by any activity. Picture: Listen activity in .NET 3.x In WF 4.0, the Pick activity provides event-based control flow modeling.  Pick contains multiple branches, where each branch...

Here’s a workflow designer FAQ finally getting the attention it deserves, and helping show off how to do custom property editing in designer. “How do I show an InArgument<bool>/<enum> in the property grid as a checkbox/combobox?”   [Aside: Before we start the guide, note that actually doing the thing you are asking about has certain implications, and that there’s one obvious alternative that works in some cases: using a plain property, instead of an InArgument<T> typed-property...

Three weeks ago we held our MIX 2011 conference in Las Vegas.  MIX is one of my favorite events of the year, and the conference always has a ton of great content and announcements.  All of the keynotes and breakout sessions from the event can be watched online for free here .  I’ll be doing a few posts in the upcoming weeks that also cover some highlights from it. ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update One of the announcements I made in my Day 1 keynote was the release of an ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools...

This post is part of a series about WCF extensibility points. For a list of all previous posts and planned future ones, go to the index page . The message inspectors are probably the most used extensibility points of the WCF runtime. Anytime you need to log, inspect, modify or completely replace a message, the two inspector interfaces ( IClientMessageInspector for the client side; IDispatchMessageInspector for the server side) are likely to be perfect candidates for the solution. There are so many...

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...

Microsoft has made the source code of ASP.NET MVC available under an open source license since the first V1 release. We’ve also integrated a number of great open source technologies into the product, and now ship jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, jQuery Validation, Modernizr.js, NuGet, Knockout.js and JSON.NET as part of it. I’m very excited to announce today that we will also release the source code for ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Web Pages (aka Razor) under an open source license (Apache 2.0),...

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...

Today we’re going to explore some internal aspects of ModelItem and its subclass ModelItemImpl. For your reference, ModelItemImpl is an internal class, making what we talk about below ‘implementation detail’, according to a narrow view based on which APIs are actually visible by way of being marked ‘public’, and therefore more likely to change in future framework versions (than something actually marked public and therefore having a 1 line API doc somewhere). Now stop worrying about such minor details...

When loading an activity assembly using Assembly.LoadFrom, you may see the following error: "Error: The values provided for the root activity's arguments did not satisfy the root activity's requirements: 'UserDefinedInputClass': Expected an input parameter value of type 'MyAssembly.UserDefinedClass' for parameter named 'UDC'. Parameter name: rootArgumentValues" Assembly.LoadFrom does not use the main application context; instead, a new context is used, so...

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 Workflow Definition First off – let’s get one thing straight.  When you create a workflow, you are creating a workflow definition .  The workflow definition still has to be validated, expressions...

This post is part of a series about WCF extensibility points. For a list of all previous posts and planned future ones, go to the index page . The first behavior covered in this series is the IServiceBehavior . It can be used to inspect or change the entire service description and runtime. For example, to collect information about all endpoints in the service, to apply some common behavior to all endpoints in the service, anything which affects the global service state, the service behavior is a...

(Or: [not] using XAML Build Task in a rehosted scenario.) Motivated by some old , less old , and recent forum threads about allowing compositional workflows in a rehosted designer scenario, with the ability to reuse activities created in XAML, I have finally played through some options for building assemblies directly from rehosted designer XAML. First though, let’s look at the standard option for compiling workflow assemblies. What normally happens when you build XAML files in an Activity Library...