Thanks to all who attended my talk on migrating from WF 3.x to WF 4 at Dev Days.  I’ve posted my slides and demos which you can download for review.  Thanks for a great show, and look for me to post some screencasts of several examples in the coming weeks. 

For those of you who attended my talk at Dev Days 2009, I’ve posted the slides and my demo code for the custom activities talk.  I’ve included the activities, the designers and the designer rehosting code along with some sample workflows using the activities. 

Also, look for some screencasts that I’ll be doing showing these activities; it will be like watching the demos all over again.

I’ll be speaking at Dev Days 09 in a couple of weeks.  I’m excited to be doing a pre-conference day on WF and WCF 4 as well as “Dublin”.  then I’ve got two WF sessions during the conference, one on building custom activities with WF 4 and another on moving from WF 3.x to WF 4. 

After the show, I’ll try to get some screencasts up of a few of my demos, and you can check out our Pluralsight On Demand! where I’ll soon be publishing some modules on “Dublin”. 

I recently took the plunge and upgraded my 64 bit desktop from Vista to Windows 7 RC and for the most part I’ve been very happy with it.  So far the only compatibility issues I’ve had were with some CD / DVD mounting tools and Live Mesh.  I quickly realized how much I’ve come to rely on Live Mesh to keep files in synch between my desktop and laptop.  All of my presentations and writing that I do live on both machines and I have a Tools folder with small utilities like .NET Reflector, Notepad2, etc.  So when Live Mesh kept crashing under Windows 7, I got a little miffed. 

I started by trying to set the compatibility to Vista or Vista Service Pack 1, but that didn’t fix the problem.  I kept getting errors that the Mesh Operating Environment had stopped working and after closing it, it would restart, only to fail again in a few minutes.  So, I did what any self-respecting developer does when they have a problem they can’t fix: I searched the web.  Nothing, no love at all.  I saw a few things about recent updates, which I’d installed already, and some registry hacks for the Win 7 beta, which were already incorporated into later builds of the product.  So finally, I did the only logical thing, I uninstalled Live mesh, logged into Mesh.com and got the installer, and re-installed.  A quick reboot, and all seems well.  So, for those of you out searching the internet for a fix, hopefully this helps you out. 

Of course, this is on My Machine, which is a home built x64 machine with an upgrade from Vista SP 1 to Win 7 RC.  With all that in the mix, your mileage will likely vary.  ;)    

Are you looking to try out BizTalk Server 2009 but don’t have the time to setup a full BizTalk environment?  Then Microsoft’s Virtual labs might be right for you.  The most popular labs for BizTalk Server have been updated for BizTalk Server 2009 and a few new ones focused on the features of BizTalk Server 2009.  Check them out if you are interested. 

In related news, I’m in the process of adding BizTalk Server 2009 content to the BizTalk Server Fundamentals course in  Pluralsight On-Demand!.  If you haven’t already subscribed, you should really check it out.  I’m spending my free time these days learning about Agile Team Practices from David Starr and ASP.NET MVC from K. Scott Allen.  It’s the next best thing to having these guys in a classroom with me.  We’re continuing to expand the library too, so the subscription gets more valuable by the month – not many investments you can say that about today!

I’ve recently published a free screencast on how to create a custom context channel in workflow services. 

.NET 3.5 supports managing context in a SOAP header or HTTP cookie, but that may not be where your context information lives. In this screencast I show an example of a custom channel that enables the context information to be passed in a URL to enable operation invocation from a link in an email.

Check out our growing collection of free .NET screencasts and videos.  Subscribe to the Pluralsight feed to be notified when new screencasts are published.  Also, check out our growing library of online .NET training courses -- see what you can learn with Pluralsight On-Demand!

I’ve recently published a free screencast on how to manage conversations in workflow services. 

Conversations are special cases of context management in workflow services requiring extra information to correctly route messages. In this screencast, I show you when you need to think about conversations and how to properly write your workflows and clients to deal with them.

Check out our growing collection of free .NET screencasts and videos.  Subscribe to the Pluralsight feed to be notified when new screencasts are published.  Also, check out our growing library of online .NET training courses -- see what you can learn with Pluralsight On-Demand!

Looking to show off your skills in building cloud applications using either .NET or PHP?  Like to make a little $$ while you are at it.  Well, if you bring your A game, you just might have a shot in the new developer competition that Microsoft is running.  You can check out the details on the contest web site, and find links to all the tools you need to get started. 

I’m looking forward to seeing some cool ideas come out of this and participating in the community judging. 

From the website: 

new CloudApp() is a US-based developer challenge for .NET & PHP developers creating cloud applications or services (hereafter "application") on the Azure™ Services Platform. Have your application judged by industry leaders Om Malik and Michael Cote and share your cloud coding skills with other developers. Grand Prize Winners will be announced on stage at Structure 09 and featured on azure.com.

Unfortunately, for those of you not in the US, you read that correctly, and this is only open to folks residing in the 50 states and DC.  I’m sure it is for legal reasons, but that definitely limits the amount of cool submissions we’ll be seeing.

I’ve recently published a free screencast on how to manage context information when using workflows, and the Send activity, to interact with workflow services. 

When using workflows as clients to workflow services, the Send activity is used to manage context on the client. This screencast covers how to configure the send activity correctly with respect to context and how to manage the context manually.

Check out our growing collection of free .NET screencasts and videos.  Subscribe to the Pluralsight feed to be notified when new screencasts are published.  Also, check out our growing library of online .NET training courses -- see what you can learn with Pluralsight On-Demand!

I’ve recently published a free screencast on how to manage context information when using a .NET client to interact with workflow services. 

This screencast shows how to manage context in .NET applications to enable multiple calls on the same proxy for different workflow instances, or to make calls to an existing workflow instance with a new proxy/channel.

NOTE: for reusing the same channel to make calls to different services, you should see this blog post that provides details on some extra steps required to turn off the automatic context management.  If you fail to do this step, you will get the following exception message: “Context cached at the channel layer cannot be changed after the channel is opened.” 

Check out our growing collection of free .NET screencasts and videos.  Subscribe to the Pluralsight feed to be notified when new screencasts are published.  Also, check out our growing library of online .NET training courses -- see what you can learn with Pluralsight On-Demand!