OK, Reading actually, but if you are in the London area and interested in workflow, then this is your chance to get a thorough understanding of not only the how of WF, but the why.  We will look deep under the covers of building WF programs, hosts and activities/components.  Check out the course information for more details and to register. 

 

July 30 - August 2

Microsoft Technology Center in Reading

Course details: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/appliedwf.aspx

 

I'm excited to be hosting a BOF this year at Tech Ed on the tracking services in Windows Workflow Foundation.  If you are interested in talking about tracking in general, the use of the included SQL tracking and query APIs, or custom tracking services to solve real business problems, then be sure to attend.  I think it will be a lot of fun to see how people use this technology as it is the key piece to real visibility in your workflows.  Hope to see you there. 

 

Session details (check schedules at Tech Ed to verify time and room):

One of my frustrations with Windows Workflow Foundation, is that there is no easy way in Visual Studio to create pure XAML workflows.  The tools really drive you toward compiling the XAML into a .NET assembly.  That, to me, defeats the purpose of using XAML.  So I created a bunch of project templates (console/library & state/sequence) that create pure XAML workflows using XAML activation.  This means the workflows are not compiled, the XAML is just copied into the build directory.  The console application project templates are setup in their program.cs to load these XAML files using an XMLReader and activate them that way. 

 

I also started working on XAML item templates so you could add individual items to a project. The problem I am having is I don't think there is a way in the project template directly to indicate that the file should be treated as content type of None and copied to the output.  I might have to write a custom wizard to get that part working.  If anyone has any easier means of accomplishing this, let me know. 

 

[Update]: I've updated the program.cs files in the templates to reflect some excellent feedback from my colleague Jon. The program now has template code to handle common exceptions when processing XAML files and also provides hooks to add types into a type provider.  In addition, I figured out that the wizard for the item templates was only a few lines of code.  To get the item templates working, you'll need to build the solution in the zip file and then either a) deploy the assembly to the GAC or to the VS\Common7\ide folder.  It needs to be in one of these two places for the VS template engine to trust it. 

 

Any feedback or questions, please post them in the comments.

 

Enjoy!

I got so tired of not being able to double-click my solution files in the Windows explorer that I finally figured out how to fix it.  First of all, I should mention that I'm running with UAC on in Vista and that I have VS configured to run as an admin.  So, I get prompted each time I start it, but that's OK, it’s a good reminder that I am running elevated and should test my code without the admin privileges. 

 

I was trying to figure out why, when my VS is set to run as admin, double-clicking would not work.  The thing that jumped out at me is that VS is not the default program for SLN files.  The Visual Studio Version Selector is the default program.  My first thought was to run that selector as admin all the time, but that didn't work.  So, I decided I don't need a version selector since I only have one version of VS on my machine right now, and mapped SLN files to DevEnv.exe.  Now, when I double click them, I get the UAC prompt and then it opens right up in Visual Studio. 

 

Hopefully this helps someone else with this little annoyance. 

I'm excited to be presenting at the upcoming Tech Ed 2007 event in Orlando next month.  I'm doing two different sessions for the Connected Systems Division (SOA track); one on BizTalk R2 and one on Windows Workflow.  If you are heading to Tech Ed, I hope you'll join me if the topics interest you (which presumably they do or you wouldn't be reading this blog!). 

 

SOA317 - Building Connected Systems on the Microsoft .NET Framework Using the Windows Communication Foundation Adapter in BizTalk Server 2006 R2

 

SOA223 - Custom Activities with Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation: A Developer's Primer

 

The June issue of MSDN magazine is up on MSDN website and for the Foundations column I wrote about the ActivityExecutionContext in WF.  In my opinion, this extremely important aspect of WF gets little attention, yet causes a lot of the developer frustration.  I hope you enjoy and that it is helpful.  Feedback is always welcome.