A little delayed, to be sure, but here are the demos from my three talks at Dev Week this year.  Thanks for all who attended.  I’ll be giving an updated version of the custom activities talk at DevDays2009 in the Netherlands at the end of May, hopefully with newer bits! 

• Context Management in WF services (including REST service with URI context)
• WF 4 Custom Activities
• Declarative Services in .NET 4
  • Declarative service with message correlation
  • Routing Service sample

My latest screencast in the Windows WF developer screencast series has been loaded up.  In this session, I go into detail about how to use one of the more powerful control flow activities in the framework.  I show how to use data to drive control flow with the replicator, how to control the execution style and how to use rules to control when execution should complete.   In addition, I show how to use code to initialize child activities before they are executed. 

Pluralsight Screencast - Using the Replicator activity in Windows WF

Previous screencasts in this series can be found on the screencast section of the Pluralsight website. You will also find short screen casts on other technologies both current (e.g. WCF) and future ("Oslo") on this page.

My latest screencast in the Windows WF developer screencast series has been loaded up.  In this session, I follow up on my previous screencast where I covered using SQL Tracking Services and dive into how Tracking Profiles work and how you can create them in code. I also showcase a couple of sample applications from the Windows SDK that allow you to visually create tracking profiles and then monitor a workflow using tracking data and the visual designer.   

Pluralsight Screencast - Working with Tracking Profiles in Windows WF

Previous screencasts in this series can be found on the screencast section of the Pluralsight website. You will also find short screen casts on other technologies both current (e.g. WCF) and future ("Oslo") on this page.

My latest screencast in the Windows WF developer screencast series has been loaded up.  In this session, I discuss the basics for setting up the SQL Tracking Service in Windows WF and how to begin tracking basic information.   In a subsequent screencast I will cover how to create tracking profiles which can be used with this or any custom tracking service. 

Pluralsight Screencast - Using SQL Tracking Services in WF

Previous screencasts in this series can be found on the screencast section of the Pluralsight website. You will also find short screen casts on other technologies both current (e.g. WCF) and future ("Oslo") on this page.

I'm excited to announce that we have now listed our new "Dublin" course on the website.  This will be a three day course where we dive in to taking advantage of the hosting features found in the new application server being developed at Microsoft.  If you are interested in finding out how you can use "Dublin" to host your WCF/WF services, manage and monitor them, and take advantage of advanced features for routing, versioning your services, etc. then this is the course for you.  I'm looking forward to the first public offering which should be posted up on the schedule soon. 

THe business rule engine in Windows Workflow Foundation is an often overlooked feature that provides powerful business logic processing and rich business rule engine execution semantics.  Some mistakenly believe this functionality can only be used from within a workflow.  I worked with Microsoft recently on a couple of articles to provide developers  hands-on examplesof using rules in .NET applications and in WCF services.   These articles are part of a new series intended to provide small concrete examples of how to use the technology.  You'll find links in the sidebar to other articles on using sequential and state machine workflows.  If you are learning WF , don't forget about our screencast series as well where we have information on WF, WCF and more. 

My latest screencast in the Windows WF developer screencast series has been loaded up as of last week.  In this session, I discuss the basics of creating custom leaf activities including how to use Dependency Properties to make your properties bindable.    

Endpoint Screencasts - Creating custom activities in Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)

Previous screencasts in this series can be found on the screencast section of the Pluralsight website. You will also find short screen casts on other technologies both current (e.g. WCF) and future ("Oslo") on this page.

My latest screencast in the Windows WF developer screencast series has been loaded up as of last week.  In this session, I discuss the basics of using the Send activity to consume a service from a workflow using WCF.    I extend the workflow created in the previous screencast to consume a service that authorizes credit cards. 

Endpoint Screencasts - Using the WCF Send Activity in Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)

Previous screencasts in this series can be found on the screencast section of the Pluralsight website. You will also find short screen casts on other technologies both current (e.g. WCF) and future ("Oslo") on this page. 

My latest screencast in the Windows WF developer screencast series has been loaded up as of this morning.  In this session, I discuss the basics of using WF to implement an operation in a WCF service, or using WF as the implementation of a WCF service by using the Receive activity.  I show you how to use this activity to implement an operation processing the input parameters and returning the result.  In addition, I do a quick walk through of using the WorkflowServiceHost class to host the workflow service and expose an endpoint for client applications to call. 

Endpoint Screencasts - Using the WCF Receive Activity in Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)

Previous screencasts in this series can be found on the screencast section of the Pluralsight website. You will also find short screen casts on other technologies both current (e.g. WCF) and future ("Oslo") on this page. 

Microsoft announced today the details of upcoming features that will be added to Windows Server 2008 to provide a rich host for WCF Services and WF workflows.  In addition, the announcement provides some information about upcoming features in the .NET Framework v4.0 including.  I'm extremely excited to have a host process for WCF and WF applications out of the box with management features for my services and workflows.  This has been a big detractor for many customers looking at adopting these technologies.  The great thing is that this host technology is integrated with IIS so I don't have yet another management story or some specialized application server, I get to leverage all the work the IIS team did to make IIS 7 and the tooling so great. 

With WCF and building workflow services, having the correlation components is a huge step forward and addresses one of my biggest gripes with the correlation available today.  It's a very exciting time to be building connected systems on the Microsoft platform.  As more information is released at PDC, I'll start blogging about some of the new features and capabilities in the framework and using "Dublin" as a host.  That's right, I said I'd actually start blogging some technical information.  :) 

Check out the information about what's coming and look for more information to come out of the Professional Developer's Conference (PDC).