All posts by : Kavitaks WebLog

1 of 22 | PDC, here we come! - The premier Microsoft conference, the PDC - Professional Developers Conference, is happening in the week of Octobert 26th in Los Angeles! Microsoft stars will join movie stars and present a bunch of upcoming technologies and paradigms to thousands of developers. There are still seats left, so please register if you havent already. You can pre-register for sessions you'd like to attend here. We have a few talks on the technologies my team works on - WCF/WF. I hope to see you at these sessions or in the lounge where a bunch of product folks will be hanging around waiting to answer your questions. We know we've been quiet and we want to break the silence! WF 4.0: A First Look, Kenny Wolf P......

2 of 22 | A bunch of WCF and WF webcasts in June - Our marketing team has launched a series of MSDN webcasts to explore the possibilities of Microsoft .NET 3.5 Framework through demonstrations and deep dives on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). You can find links to our June MSDN Webcasts here:  http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msdnnetframework35.aspx?tab=webcasts&id=liveall...

3 of 22 | Rule Reevaluation Behavior - need your feedback and scenarios - RuleReevaluationBehavior has been supported in WF Rules since .NET Framework 3.0. It is an enum that you can tweak to control forward chaining and the re-evaluation on a per rule basis. Typically this property is used to prevent infinite looping due to dependencies that the rule has, either on it's own actions or on other rules. To learn more about this, please go to http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.workflow.activities.rules.rulereevaluationbehavior.aspx or http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480193.aspx#introwork_topic5. We are trying to find more about the usage of RuleReevaluationBehavior - if you are using it in your WF Rules apps, please email me (contact m......

4 of 22 | RuleChainingBehavior.Update only and Rule attributes - need your feedback and scenarios - RuleChainingBehavior.UpdateOnly has been supported in WF Rules since .NET Framework 3.0. It allows you to explicitly participate in the forward chaining process. Rule attributes are RuleRead, RuleWrite, RuleInvoke which can be placed on methods that potentially modify or read variables being used in rules. To learn more about this, please go to http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480193.aspx#introwork_topic5. We are trying to find more about the usage of these features - if you are using it in your WF Rules apps, please email me (contact me through my blog) as I am interested in learning about your scenario. We are considering changing the design here and want to determine the im......

5 of 22 | Tell us what Activities you want us to build - We would like to know what Activities you want us to ship with in the next version of Windows Workflow Foundation. To help us with prioritizing our development effort, we've created a survey. We would really appreciate if you could take some time out in responding to the survey about the current and future usage of Windows Workflow Foundation activities and share your feedback on where you want us to invest going forward. Thank you in advance for helping shape the future of Activities!! The link to this online survey is: https://live.datstat.com/MSCSD-Collector/Survey.ashx?Name=WF_Activities_Survey_blog...

6 of 22 | Some open positions and Business Rules Forum 2007 - It's been a while since I blogged, due to vacations and just a lot of work. I also have some additional responsibilities at work and now own Activities, Rules and Community which has been keeping me busy. Part of the reason I am busy is that I have two open Program Manager positions, both posted on our career site - one for Rules and one for the Community that I am actively trying to fill. I am attending the Business Rules Forum next week in Orlando where I am co-presenting a session on "Workflow and Rules: Better Together" with InRule's Theresa O' Neil. Looking forward to see what's new in the Rules community.  ...

7 of 22 | Come join the Connected Framework team! - Our team shipped WCF + WF and is now on a quest to build the next generation distributed application platform. We have a variety of openings for a Program Manager on our team and we'd love to hear from you! The openings are at various levels and are in a mix of areas - we have a release PM position, a community PM position, an interop PM position, and several feature PM positions (Workflow Activities, Programming Model and WF/WCF Runtime, Serialization). Here are the links to the job descriptions on the http://www.microsoft.com/jobs site. Check them out and contact us through the jobs site! Area Job Code/Req # Details Activities – Feature PM 184742 http://m......

8 of 22 | Windows Workflow Foundation Rules - Part II Webcast - I did a webcast in May on Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation Rules. I am doing another one this Friday, on some advanced scenarios and extensibility. I hope to see you there! Here's the registration link. I've been told that the recording will be available via the same link for 60 days. Event Name: Webcast: Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation Rules - Part IIStart Date: 7/6/07Start Time: 1:30 PM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)End Time: 3:00 PM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada) Audio conferencing: +1 (866) 500-6738Participant code: 7545634Presenter code: 9070863Please click on the following link for more information regarding this Webcasthttp://msev......

9 of 22 | Doing a webcast, and doing it right - I had my first Live WebCast today on Intro to WF Rules. I did a tech-check with Julie and we checked the sound, the slides, discussed the protocol we would follow to reach each other during the Webcast, how to mute everyone else except me etc...We had good turnout, with 38 people out of the 65 registered. All was well till the 3rd slide when I couldnt get the animation going! I realized later what I was doing wrong. In live meeting, you need to click on the smaller slide icons to move across the slides and get to the next step in your animation. I had been clicking on the view on the right. I wish I knew that before because this ended up stalling the webcast for a few minutes! The ......

10 of 22 | Intro to WF Rules Webcast - I will be giving a "Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation Rules" webcast on Friday May 18th at 11am PST. Hope to see you there! Description: This session provides an introduction to the rules engine capabilities provided in Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). In this webcast learn more about the WF Rules mechanisms, which also supports more advanced scenarios. See an example of how to externalize rules so that they can be maintained separately from the workflow assembly. In addition, learn how to author and execute rules outside of a workflow. Start Date: 5/18/07Start Time: 2:00 PM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)End Time: 3:30 PM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada) ......

11 of 22 | Your feedback - Alberto, a PM on the Activities team who drove our BPEL release, mentioned that there have been over 3000 downloads since March when we first released our BPEL CTP. However, we havent heard feedback from customers, making us think that most customers may not be aware of our Connect site: http://connect.microsoft.com/wf. Paul posted on his blog as well. Infact, not just for BPEL, I would like to request you to reach us with your comments and feedback on other pieces of WF as well via the above site. We track these bugs regularly and its a great way to get communication started with the team.    ...

12 of 22 | Business Analyst Authoring support - In WF V1, we targeted developers and worked with some partners to enable high level authoring capabilities on top of our foundation. InRule went out with the general availability of their support for WF this week - you can read about it here....

13 of 22 | WF Web Approvals Starter Kit Released - Paul Andrew just announced the release of the first out of a series of new starter kits to help developers new to these technologies get started faster....

14 of 22 | A new custom activity sample - PolicyFromFile activity - Maggie, a tester on the Rules team, recently wrote a PolicyFromFile sample. The idea here is similar to the PolicyFromService sample that is part of the ExternalRuleSetDemo, except that the PolicyFromFile activity does not use a database and externalizes rules to a file outside the workflow. At design time, the activity will read from a specified rules file, or if no .rules was defined, a default .rules file with the same name as the workflow file will be created. The name of the .rules file is set on the RulesFileName property. Get the sample here....

15 of 22 | Another sample from the rules team - Rules against XML - There's another new sample up, written by one of our testers Charlie. This sample shows how the WF Rules Engine can be used to process rules on Xml documents. This is something BizTalk BRE customers were able to do inside the Business Rules Composer, but is not obvious how to do with the WF Rules engine because of lack of first class tooling. However, since all the WF Rules Engine deals with is a .NET type, if you can convert your data as expose it to the engine as a type, you can easily accomplish the scenario. Get the sample here - http://wf.netfx3.com/files/folders/rules_samples/entry8981.aspx  ...

16 of 22 | DinnerNow has been updated! - An updated version of Dinner Now is now available - (version 1.2) http://www.CodePlex.com/DinnerNow   The new version has several bug fixes and a few enhancements. Out-workflow PowerShell Commandlet  - David Aiken developed a custom commandlet for Windows PowerShell allows a user to quickly display a workflow based on the data returned from another commandlet.   For example, by simply running the command get-workflow | out-workflow in PowerShell, a user will be able to visually see the status of a running workflow in  the workflow designer control.  Live Service Trace Viewer – The Live Service Trace Viewer is sample that Craig McMurtry initially devel......

17 of 22 | DinnerNow.net is live on CodePlex - Our evangelism team has built a new sample application called DinnerNow.net. It is a fictious online marketplace for people to order food from a variety of restaurants. The samples showcases a bunch of the .Net Framework 3.0 technologies - WF, WCF, WPF and Windows Cardspace. It also uses Windows Vista features such as the Windows Sidebar, and Web technologies like ASP.Net, Ajax, Virtual Earth etc. You can download the source code, documentation, set up scripts from here: http://www.codeplex.com/dinnernow. You can find other DinnerNow resources as http://www.dinnernow.net Enjoy!    ...

18 of 22 | Patterns and Practices: Web Service Software Factory has been released - Don Smith from the Patterns and Practices group has published an architectural and development guideline around the Web Service Software Factory specifically for WCF. The Web Service Software Factory (also known as the Service Factory) is an integrated collection of tools, patterns, source code and prescriptive guidance that helps our customers quickly and consistently construct Web services that adhere to well known architecture and design patterns. The Service Factory provides guidance that addresses many of the challenges associated with building WCF and ASP.NET Web services and the components of a distributed application. These challenges include: Designing WCF and ASMX messages a......

19 of 22 | Spanish post on the forum - My main work for the next two weeks is to take care of WCF servicing. This means responding to forum questions, taking care of any customer issues that arrive in these two weeks etc. As part of that, I was going through old forum questions that have not been answered, and I ran into this post: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=503038&SiteID=1 [this link doesnt work anymore since the post was deleted as it was very old and still un-answered] Someone posted a question in spanish. Nothing wrong with that except most of us dont know spanish. The best part however was that someone else then responded to the post using babelfish to convert the spanish post into english.......

20 of 22 | Authoring rules against a collection - Sometimes you want to write rules against all items in a collection. In WF V1, this is not supported natively but can be achieved in the following manner: (you can come up with other ways too, but the essential idea is you want to simulate looping using forward chaining in rules) Rule 1 (Highest priority rule; Priority = 2) IF true THEN index = 0 Rule 2 (Next higher priority rule; Priority = 1) IF index > myCollection.Length THEN Halt Rule 3 (Lowest priority rule; Priority = 0) IF myCollection[index].... (do whatever you want with that element) THEN (whatever action you want); index = index + 1 So, the way rule execution proceeds is that the highest priority rule (Ru......

21 of 22 | Weird bug - I was looking into a question on the WF forums and trying out something. So I defined a WF Sequential WF project, added some properties on my root workflow class, added a policy activity, defined some rules against those properties - all standard stuff. Things worked great. Now, I defined another class with in Workflow1.cs file and I wanted to define a property of that type in my WF and add more rules operating on that field. On compiling the project again, the Policy activity could not find the RuleSet in the .rules file. Baffled, I asked John Rumell if he knew what was going on. He is one of the Rules developers on my team, and only one of the handful people around in this quiet holiday p......

22 of 22 | TechReady 4 in Seattle - As part of an effort to get the Microsoft field ready for the technologies the product teams are building, Microsoft organizes a conference called TechReady. It is Microsoft internal mainly meant for the Microsoft Technical Field community. TechReady 4 is in Seattle in February. As part of that, I am giving a talk on Windows Workflow Foundation Rules Extensibility. Over the holidays, one of the things I am going to be doing is getting my deck and demos in place. I want to get it done before the work madness begins again in January. Jurgen has given this talk before, so I will be tailoring it mostly based on the feedback he has got and showing some new examples. If you are planning to attend......