I was building a test solution for my next blog post and I started to create a new workflow service in Visual Studio. But apparently the designer came up with an exception for me:
Workflow Designer encountered problems with your document
Please check the document for invalid content, namespaces, references or reference loops.
‘\’ is an unexpected token. The expected token is ‘;’. Line 3, position 99.
After opening the XAML view, I noticed the full path of the xamlx file was added to the xml in the sad:XamlDebuggerXmlReader.FileName attribute of the sequence (main element). And there it appeared that the fileName was not well-encoded, resulting in invalid XML, because of the usage of ‘&’ sign. (I added my blog tests in a folder with name R&D …)
The solution to this issue was to manually escape the R&D with R&D string.
Off course, one could argue why the ‘source code’ or ‘model’ of a Workflow service needs to maintain a reference to a physical file on a developers machine (in source safe, everyone on the same project can check out to different locations…)
Just wanted to share this one.