Orchestration / Workflow

1001 of 1492 | BPEL on top of WF - Check out our BPEL activities CTP, delivered on top of the Windows Workflow Foundation framework.  BPEL is just another set of activities (parallel to the WF ones) that can be used to implement BPEL-compliant workflows.  They also serialize/deserialize into the BPEL serialized format.  You can also mix in WF activities and save the resulting workflow out as XAML (of course, it will stop being BPEL-compliant since BPEL has a fixed number of activities and isn't extensible in this fashion).  Congrats to the feature team - Deling, Alberto, and Tom! ...

1002 of 1492 | Follow up to Fundamentals of WF Presentation and Developer Resources for WF - A few people asked for the demos from this presentation . Links for the presentation are at the bottom of the post If you have not already set up your development environment for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Development, follow the below steps: Prerequisites:...(read more)...

1003 of 1492 | Follow up to Fundamentals of WF Presentation and Developer Resources for WF - A few people asked for the demos from this presentation.Links for the presentation are at the bottom of the post If you have not already set up your development environment for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Development, follow the below steps: Prerequisites: a) Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vistab) Visual Studio 2005 Install the following: 1) .Net Framework 3.0 Redistributable2) Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation)3) You can also optionally download and install:Microsoft® Windows® Software Development Kit for Windows Vista™ and .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime  ComponentsBefore installing the above read the provided instructions. Be......

1004 of 1492 | Follow up to Fundamentals of WF Presentation and Developer Resources for WF - A few people asked for the demos from this presentation.Links for the presentation are at the bottom of the post If you have not already set up your development environment for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Development, follow the below steps: Prerequisites: a) Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vistab) Visual Studio 2005 Install the following: 1) .Net Framework 3.0 Redistributable2) Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation)3) You can also optionally download and install:Microsoft® Windows® Software Development Kit for Windows Vista™ and .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime  ComponentsBefore installing the above read the provided instructions. Be......

1005 of 1492 | Follow up to Fundamentals of WF Presentation and Developer Resources for WF - A few people asked for the demos from this presentation.Links for the presentation are at the bottom of the post If you have not already set up your development environment for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) Development, follow the below steps: Prerequisites: a) Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vistab) Visual Studio 2005 Install the following: 1) .Net Framework 3.0 Redistributable2) Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation)3) You can also optionally download and install:Microsoft® Windows® Software Development Kit for Windows Vista™ and .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime  ComponentsBefore installing the above read the provided instructions. Be......

1006 of 1492 | More Specifics on the WF Issue - I asked Tomas to expand on the details of the issue we faced last Sunday and it's this:What’s going is that you wanted to create a custom, reusable composite StateActivity-derived activity. While WF allows you to create an StateActivity-derived class, it restricts a bit what you can actually do with it.  The core problem here is that the way you wanted to use the custom activity was similar (in a fashion) to building a custom composite sequence activity. That’s because when you create such a one (like with Add to Project -> New Item -> New Activity) you have full design-time support for creating your composite, including being able to drag & drop activities in......

1007 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 1105 - What a crazy week this has been. Big news coming next week. stpBA Storyboarding - Capture and validate requirements through storyboarding with this Visio add-on. If Larry O'Brien recommends it, it's worth looking into. Trial download is here, pricing from $495. Copy/Paste References - Add-in to supply a missing Visual Studio feature (via DotNetKicks) Community Server 2007 Beta 2, Now Available! - And ready for you to download. K2 "BlackPearl" Beta 1 TR2 - BPM platform on top of WF. Sandboxie - Allow you to run any Windows app in a sandbox where write operations do not affect your hard ......

1008 of 1492 | UX Roundtable Comments - Ever since John told me about the UX Roundtable event at Redmond last month, I’ve been really curious about what designers think Microsoft can do to reach out and help support the UX community in Canada? As user experience specialists (IAS, IxDs, UI designers, web designers, etc.), we have compassion for users. Often times, in order to help the users be successful, we need to know them better than they know themselves. However, the purpose of the UX Roundtable is to explore what we as designers need to feel connected and to be successful in what we do. I want to share with you some the comments I gathered from the UX Roundtable discussion notes. I should mention that what I refer to "commu......

1009 of 1492 | Ars Technica Reviews Windows Vista - More technical than most reviews, Peter Bright covers the APIs and what makes Vista different under the hood, including: Windows API history User interface - Windows Presentation Foundation and the Desktop Window Manager. Printing - XPS documents Under the hood - Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation Video and Audio - Media Foundation A follow-up article promises to cover security and the features that got cut. Read Windows Vista: more than just a pretty face...

1010 of 1492 | Fundamentals of WF - Tomorrow (March 20) I am doing a presentation at the Metro Toronto .Net User Group entitled:Fundamentals of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Most of it will be demos introducing WF. Of course, I will also include BizTalk in the presentation, discussing the differences and similarities between WF and BizTalk and when it is appropriate to use either technology. The demos will include: Creating a Sequential WorkflowCommunicating with the HostLogging WorkflowsPersisting WorkflowsCreating Custom ActivitiesCreating a State Machine WorkflowUsing WF and BizTalk together You can sign up for the presentation here:http://www.metrotorontoug.com/User+Group+Events/379.aspx...

1011 of 1492 | Fundamentals of WF - Tomorrow (March 20) I am doing a presentation at the Metro Toronto .Net User Group entitled:Fundamentals of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Most of it will be demos introducing WF. Of course, I will also include BizTalk in the presentation, discussing the differences and similarities between WF and BizTalk and when it is appropriate to use either technology. The demos will include: Creating a Sequential WorkflowCommunicating with the HostLogging WorkflowsPersisting WorkflowsCreating Custom ActivitiesCreating a State Machine WorkflowUsing WF and BizTalk together You can sign up for the presentation here:http://www.metrotorontoug.com/User+Group+Events/379.aspx...

1012 of 1492 | Fundamentals of WF - Tomorrow (March 20) I am doing a presentation at the Metro Toronto .Net User Group entitled:Fundamentals of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Most of it will be demos introducing WF. Of course, I will also include BizTalk in the presentation, discussing the differences and similarities between WF and BizTalk and when it is appropriate to use either technology. The demos will include: Creating a Sequential WorkflowCommunicating with the HostLogging WorkflowsPersisting WorkflowsCreating Custom ActivitiesCreating a State Machine WorkflowUsing WF and BizTalk together You can sign up for the presentation here:http://www.metrotorontoug.com/User+Group+Events/379.aspx...

1013 of 1492 | WF and WS-BPEL 1.1 - The first CTP of the WS-BPEL 1.1 activities for Windows Workflow Foundation are now available . A later release plans to support WS-BPEL 2.0...(read more)...

1014 of 1492 | BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation March Community Technology Preview is released - As I predicted last month , the March 2007 CTP for our BPEL activities for Windows Workflow Foundation was released today. BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is an add on for Windows Workflow Foundation in the .NET Framework 3.0. BPEL is the Business...(read more)...

1015 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 1100 - Survived the Ides of March without any daggers in sight. SlickEdit 2007 - The latest iteration of this programmer's editor is out. Trial download is here, pricing from $284. {smartassembly} 2.1 - New version of this tool for tuning and obfuscating .NET assemblies, with debugging and other improvements. Trial download is here, pricing from $399. Wiimote and .NET - Does anyone really need a managed library for the latest Nintendo toy? Probably not, but it exists anyhow. (via DotNetKicks) TransNTFS - Managed implementation of Transactional NTFS (TxF) APIs - Just what it says. ......

1016 of 1492 | What a week - So, I'm sitting in Sea-Tac airport waiting to return home with Charles Young from the MVP Summit. Not only has it been great to meet and put so many faces to names but the whole experience was fantastic. Of course, it pretty much rained all week, but I certainly can't complain about that. A big thanks go out to all the people behind the organization and especially Marjan Kalantar from the product group for putting together a great show and giving us plenty to think about. The fact that I am writing this on pluralsight rather than jonfancey.com is also of course very significant. I've just joined up and will be starting to teach Applied BizTalk alongside my new BizTalk and WF col......

1017 of 1492 | Document approval workflow system - Generic, full cycle of document approval workflow system, using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)....

1018 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 1095 - Always a joy when the c: drive decides to fill up overnight. ColorTextBox - A middle ground between TextBox and RichTextBox. Dotfuscator 4.0 - Obfuscator with support for Windows Vista and .NET 3.0. .NET Compact Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2 Redistributable - The latest upgrade for the baby box. (via Neil Cowburn) The Ajax Papers: Part I - Start of a new systematic look at Ajax from one of telerik's technical evangelists. A Roundup for “Developers, Developers, Developers…” - Solution Watch links to a whole mess of online tools with a developer focus. ......

1019 of 1492 | Becoming XML free - How many times have we heard that "use XML, because it is both human and machine readable"?? We are supposed to stick application assembly into XML, so that people (i.e. non-Java programmers) can modify that at some later point in time. Does that ever happen? We are supposed to stick Configuration data into XML files, because people (i.e. non-programmers) can modify that at deploy time. We nowadays can write XML to create UIs, business logic, workflow models and what not... ...

1020 of 1492 | Creative Notes: Let iClip, CubeDoor enhance your workflow - While we often think of productivity enhancers for Photoshop, InDesign, QuarkXPress and other creative apps, there are plenty of other things that can boost your efficiency. James Dempsey looks at two, iClip and CubeDoor. ...

1021 of 1492 | Start++ Is All That And Then Some - If you’re running Vista, run, don’t walk, and go download and install Start++ (thanks to Omar Shahine for turning me on to this). Make it the first thing you do. Many thanks to Brandon Paddock who developed this nice little tool. He describes the tool in this post. I have a message for Start++ from the Start menu. “You complete me!”. Ok, terribly corny jokes aside, it’s the little things that save me lots of time in the long run. For example, starting and stopping SQL server is kind of annoying for me on Vista. Here’s my the typical workflow. Hit Windows Key, type in cmd type net stop mssql Doh! System error 1060 occurred. Right, I need to be an administrator. Grab the trackball Click ......

1022 of 1492 | Two WF Tracking MSDN Articles - Last Janruary MSDN published two articles on WF Tracking: David Gristwood authored a Tracking Services Introduction article here, and Ranjesh Jaganathan authored a Tracking Services Deep Dive article here. David works in the Microsoft Developer and Evangelism Group in the UK, and Ranjesh was part of the core product team that worked on WF Tracking. Great articles by WF Tracking experts. Check them out....

1023 of 1492 | Creating Rules using the OM - I wrote a small sample that shows how you can create Rules using the Object Model we expose, without any tooling etc. This is useful if you're writing custom editors or if you're converting rules / expressions in some form into WF Rules. You can check it out here: http://wf.netfx3.com/files/folders/rules_samples/entry9178.aspx   -Kavita  ...

1024 of 1492 | Foundations: Tracking Services in Windows Workflow Foundation - Learn all about one of the core features in Windows Workflow Foundation: Tracking Services....

1025 of 1492 | A Comparison of TFS vs Subversion for Open Source Projects - We’ve been having an internal debate within the Subtext mailing list over the merits of SourceForge vs Google Code Project Hosting vs Codeplex. Much of the discussion hinges around the benefits of Subversion for Open Source projects when compared to Team Foundation System (TFS). Before I begin, I do not mean for this to devolve into a religious argument. This is merely my critique from the perspective of running an Open Source project. I personally think both are fine products and both probably work equally well in the corporate environment. TFS Advantages Easy of use. For developers with a background in using Visual Source Safe or Sourcegear Vault, the interface into TFS will be familiar.......

1026 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 1090 - And so endeth another week. Argotic - Set of .NET libraries for consuming and generating RSS and Atom feeds. Downloads here, licensed under Microsoft Permissive License. RoboForm - Combination password manager and web form filler. Trial download is here, $29.95 to license the Pro version. (via John Powers) iCopyFilenames - Utility to enable single-click copying of filenames from Explorer to clipboard. € 4.99 to register. Maintenance Plan Changes in SQL Server 2005 SP2 - Charming. Installing SP2 mucks up the timing of mainenance plans, making them run at hourly instead of daily ......

1027 of 1492 | Lab 12: Using SharePoint Server Workflows with InfoPath 2007 - Learn how to create Web pages in Visual Studio 2005 that include links that open InfoPath 2007 forms. Add query parameters to the URL to control how the form behaves, and create a custom page that displays InfoPath forms and ASP.NET controls together. ...

1028 of 1492 | Free elearning courses from Microsoft - Does anything come free from Microsoft...!!Fact is that MS has been taking such initiatives from years. For example there are good investments from MS towards WebCast, Communities and news group, MSDN, etc which has always been free.At this point I noticed couple of good free courses:- Clinic 5135: Introduction to Developing with Windows® Presentation Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005- Clinic 5136: Introduction to Developing with Windows® Workflow Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005- Clinic 5137: Introduction to Developing with Windows® Communication Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005- Clinic 5230: Developing Enhanced Web Experiences with Microsoft® ASP.NET AJAX Extensions   ......

1029 of 1492 | Microsoft provides BPEL 2.0 in WF - BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation March CTP - In March 2007 Microsoft plans to release a CTP of a set of BPEL activities for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). This will be called BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation March CTP and the CTP release will implement the BPEL 1.1 specification. The final...(read more)...

1030 of 1492 | WF, BPEL and the Dark Side of the Moon - There are a few common questions I usually get when I talk about workflow: That's great, but I can't use SQL Server, can I use foo ? How can I use it to re-unite Pink Floyd for one last tour? What about BPEL support? Question 1: Check out the Persistence Service sample in the SDK. Question 2:  Man I wish I could say yes, but that's probably a feature that might show up after Orcas if I have my way. Question 3: We've done some dancing around this on timelines when it has been brought up in the past, but Paul has the scoop here.  I think this is a great thing for our customers, the support for BPEL not only allows the use of additional process defintion artifacts in the enterprise,......

1031 of 1492 | Workflow/BPM product Bonita v3 released with graphical tools - Bonita v3 has just been released. Bonita is a workflow/BPM project. Major changes for this release include an XPDL-compliant graphical workflow editor; XPDL is a standard process definition language that encourages interoperability between workflows and business processes. ...

1032 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 1085 - Not much shakin'. See you on Monday. Proto - Data visualization app the combines local data and internet services with VBA and Flash support. Free for personal and non-commercial use. Download here. (via Anne Zelenka) ASP.NET ViewState Helper - Real time tracking of your ViewState for ASP.NET applications in IE. (via Scott Hanselman) The Programmer Phases of Grief: or Language Translation is Harder Than It Looks - Scott Hanselman falls down a rabbit hole that many of us have spent time in. --> Sponsors DotNetBar Suite, the best Office 2007 ......

1033 of 1492 | What to use Windows Workflow Foundation for? - Paul Andrew writes on what to use WF for, excellent information for you and your customers. Check it out here....

1034 of 1492 | 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....

1035 of 1492 | PolicyFromFile activity posted on the community site - Maggie, a tester on the Rules team, has written a PolicyFromFile custom activity which shows how you can externalize the rules outside your workflow. Read about it here -Kavita...

1036 of 1492 | Jon Flanders is joining Pluralsight - My friend Jon Flanders just announced he is joining Pluralsight . Jon will be working together with Aaron Skonnard and Matt Milner in Pluralsight ’s BizTalk and WF curriculums. Congrats to Jon and Pluralsight ....(read more)...

1037 of 1492 | 2007 is the year for big changes I guess .... - On the personal front - I'm getting married in March - big personal change (well - not really when you've been engaged for over 5 years! - LOL)!  On the technology front - I've decided to join Pluralsight!  Aaron just made the announcement on his blog - http://pluralsight.com/blogs/aaron/archive/2007/02/19/46155.aspx I'm very excited to get to work with the team of guys I used to work with (Aaron, Fritz, Keith, Ted, Ian, Craig, Kirk, Mike, Joe, Dan, and Brian) as well as the guys at Pluralsight I haven't worked with yet (Matt and Scott).  We will have a pretty formitable team of BizTalk and Workflow talent, so if you are looking for training on those te......

1038 of 1492 | Code Talks.. - I had promised to blog about this topic a while ago, but never had a chance. Dare recently posted a entry along the same lines and it motivated me to add my $0.02. A co-worker and close friend of mine once told me that “Code Talks and Bullshit walks”. In fact, its one of the key reasons why Windows Workflow Foundation was successful. The entire team was focused on execution…on occasion perhaps too much. There were times when copious amounts of work was discarded because there might not have been the “right amount” of planning/design before a code editor was whipped into action. One of the skills of creating software is knowing when you’ve designed enough (to at least repurpose what you migh......

1039 of 1492 | Jon Flanders joins Pluralsight! - Here at Pluralsight we take pride in having the most recognized authorities in the industry teaching our premier .NET courses -- our business model revolves around that core principle. As a result, our BizTalk crew wouldn't have been 100% complete without bringing one of the biggest BizTalk names into our family. Today I'm excited to announce that Jon Flanders, of masteringbiztalk.com fame, has joined Pluralsight as a course author and instructor. Welcome aboard Jon!   Jon is not only a solid technologist but also a great friend of ours who we respect a lot. We go way back with him...I personally used to teach a popular Web application development course with Jon over 8 or 9 years ago, bac......

1040 of 1492 | Microsoft Architecture Journal - Issue 12 Call For Papers - Microsoft’s Architecture Journal is a quarterly magazine, providing a world-class forum for the publication of unique articles on how good architecture can help create great implementations. Microsoft’s Architecture Journal is available as a printed subscription (you can order your own here) and also online here Although we've only just finalized Issue #11, in order to hit TechEd dates this year I'm now looking for abstracts and ideas for Issue #12, the theme of which is Web Architecture (think web based architectures, hosting, deployment, web services, lot's of scope here). Writing for the Architecture Journal gives you the opportunity to get your thoughts and ideas in the hands of ......

1041 of 1492 | News: Adobe ships Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 - Adobe announced Monday that it's shipped Photoshop Lightroom, its workflow software for pro photographers. ...

1042 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 1080 - Today marks the fourth anniversary of the Daily Grind. Thanks for sticking around. ANTS Profiler 3 BETA now available for download - The latest round from Red Gate. Nitobi Complete UI Suite - Suite of AJAX controls, including grid and combobox that work with ASP.NET and various others that don't. Community Server 2007 Beta 1 Available - One of the heavyweights of .NET blogging software is revving again. An Introduction to OpenID - Tim Marman explains the basics. Web Based Collaboration Tools - Marcus Vorwaller tries out a few in the hopes of designing a simple org cha......

1043 of 1492 | The Worlds Longest Month – How much does your business really need you? - I’m happy to be home, and I don’t mean that in the ordinary ‘happy to be home’ way. You see, our annual trip to Asia went well this year, but just as we were getting on a plane from Tokyo back to the US I suffered a medical emergency and wound up in the hospital. Everything turned out fine—I’m home again and steadily recovering from what turned out to be a nasty but routine illness. But I’m happy to be home, in a big way. So, back to business: why am I writing about this? First, I wanted to explain my long absence, and thank everyone at SitePoint (members included) for their patience and kind words. Second, being away from my business and my clients was a big eye-opener so it seems an i......

1044 of 1492 | DinnerNow: Microsoft Sample Application - Microsoft has created a sample application that shows off their latest technology: The demo utilizes several technologies including: IIS7, ASP.NET Ajax Extensions, Linq, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Powershell, and the .NET Compact Framework. Their first screencast shows life as a shopping cart user and has the usual ajax shopping cart features that we are used to now (dynamic update of amounts). The coming screencasts will show the backend views and will hopefully have some interesting Ajax use cases implemented. ...

1045 of 1492 | Outbound Messaging with .NET 1.1 - As I mentioned way back in April 2003, wsdl.exe /server is basically useless. This is fixed in .NET 2.0, and wsdl.exe /serverInterface works pretty much as you'd expect (or at as I'd expect, which is good enough for me). If you're trying to use the new Outbound Messaging feature that was part of the recent Winter release, and you're still on .NET 1.1, then you'll run into this real fast. For those who haven't seen the feature, basically you specify some condition to send you a message, you define what fields you want in the message from the target object, and we generate a WSDL that represents the messages we'll send you. You feed this wsdl into your tool of choice to spit out your server s......

1046 of 1492 | Make type-casting inside a workflow easier with TypeCastActivity - An article on object down-casting and up-casting inside Windows Workflow Foundation....

1047 of 1492 | [Stay Tuned]: BPEL, Windows Worflow Foundation and BizTalk - I have been involved in a couple of pretty good competitive bids in some public tenders recently and am thoroughly enjoying it. I have come head-to-head with the usual suspects of heavy hitters in the areas of collaboration, SOA / ESB and portal plays such as IBM, Oracle and the likes. On another related note: Since I am in the compete space recently, I have been keeping watch on what is coming out of the standards body and I think that WS-BPEL (which was BPEL4WS ...) should have their specifications ready by next month (March 2007). Having said that, one of the points that will make Microsoft a even stronger challenger in the enterprise space is what I believ......

1048 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 1075 - Getting new speakers is a good excuse for turning the music up some. telepark.wiki pro - Wiki with AJAX navigation and editor. Online demo, 99 euros to register. SearchInform Mail Sniffer - Intercept all of your company's e-mail and store it to a database for searching. Trial download here, pricing from $200. Microsoft Exchange Calendar Update Tool - Another part of updating to keep up with the Daylight Savings Time changes. NetAdvantage for WPF 2007 Volume 1 – Beta 1 - Infragistics is releasing their first control suite for WPF. Gardens Point Ruby.NET Compiler New Beta ......

1049 of 1492 | Understanding Correlation in WorkFlows - This article tries to explain need and the concept of correlation in workflows...

1050 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 1074 - These early morning conference calls are taking a toll on my sleep schedule. Announcing World’s First WPF Ribbon Control - Coming from DevComponents and available now in beta form to DotNetBar customers. ViEmu for Word & Outlook - For you folks who just can't live without vi/vim emulation. Trial download here, $69.95 to register. Pipes - New drag and drop online programming environment from Yahoo for creating new mashups and manipulating RSS feeds. Disaster Recovery and Trouble-Free Continuous Integration - Good advice from Travis Illig. If your continuous integration server died, how long would i......