Orchestration / Workflow

1101 of 1492 | Matt and Paul talk WF - A few weeks back Paul Andrew and I sat down with Ron Jacobs to record this Arcast about WF.    The funny thing is that a few weeks before that, Paul Andrew and I sat down with Ron Jacobs to record that same Arcast, except there was a problem with the microphone and Ron's voice didn't get recorded, so it was as if Paul and I were extemporaneously responding to the voices in our heads about WF. There are more questions to go through, so we will be doing at least a part 2.  Any feedback or other questions you want to see answered? Let me know!  ...

1102 of 1492 | WF inside of SharePoint - I'm a little late to notice this, but Eilene Hao, a PM on the SharePoint Workflow team, has put together a massive 7 part series on writing workflows in SharePoint. I haven't focused a lot on workflows inside of Office, looks like I need to spin up a VPC and dive through some articles! Intro The Workflow Objects and Crash Course on Mechanics Planning Your Workflow Steps for Developing Workflows: Modeling Your Workflow in VS Designing and Binding Forms Coding Your workflow Deploying and Debugging Your Workflow Summary and Final Thoughts  ...

1103 of 1492 | Thanks Cedar Rapids! - I had a great time talking about Windows Workflow tonight. My slides and code are up on my Presentations area. Share this post: Email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit!| kick it! ...

1104 of 1492 | Windows WorkFlow Foundation ( WWF ) - This Articles will provide the details about Workflow Foundation....

1105 of 1492 | Back at it… - Wow, I realized only recently that I haven’t blogged since June at TechEd Boston. I’ve been working hard on a few new projects both in work and in life. Mostly importantly, Lilian & I are in the midst of planning our wedding . We’ve chosen the location, photographer and need to get the DJ and wedding cake taken care of (I own driving those…) I’ve been learning what it means to run a services that comprise a developer platform in the sky. The Relay & STS are experimental technologies I’ve been working on over the last few months and we’re releasing a few more in the next few months. Stay tuned… I plan to blog more frequently and include both a mix of specific WF topics (I’m going to post a s......

1106 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 1031 - Icy fog has got to be the wackiest weather of all. EmuEngine - Library for creating 2D games in C#. (via DotNetKicks) SharePoint Inspector - App for browsing around your SharePoint 2007 farm. (via Jan Tielens) Omea Pro - A little bird tells me that this information management app - which I can't do without despite its warts and pain points - is about to go free and open source. A public beta of SQL Backup 5.0 out now - Red Gate's alternative for backing up Microsoft SQL Server. Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals - Trial Edition - ......

1107 of 1492 | Universal Desktop Daily - Wednesday, December 7, 2006 - Tons of stuff. WPF/E and Flash working together. The designer/developer workflow on On10, Acrobat Reader is out, Adobe and SAP, Ajax myths, and Jesse Warden talks about the "devigner" workflow....

1108 of 1492 | News: Digidesign releases Pro Tools 7.3 - Digidesign on Wednesday released an upgrade for Pro Tools, adding new music composition tools, customizable user enhancements and improved post production workflows. ...

1109 of 1492 | WF tour of Ireland! Yippee - So I currently am doing a tour of user groups in Ireland talking about WF.  Could not be a better combo - one of my favor countries in the world - plus one of my favorite technologies!  Yipee!!!! Anyway if you are in Ireland and reading this - here are the dates:     Galway; Thur, Dec 7th, 7:30pm – Harbour Hotel Cork; Mon, Dec 11th, 7pm – Imperial Hotel Limerick; Tue, Dec 12th, 7pm – Pegasus Suite, Clarion Hotel, Steamboat Quay, Limerick Dublin; Wed, Dec 13th, 7pm – Morrison Hotel Belfast; Thurs, Dec 14th, 7:30pm - Queen's University: Please come.  And yes blogging will continue on technical topics soon - I felt sympathy for Kimberly Tr......

1110 of 1492 | Firebug Public Beta - get it now! - Firebug, Joe Hewitt's long-awaited Firefox extension for debugging DOM/CSS/JS/Ajax projects has finally hit public beta, and is available for download as of today. If you're doing any work tweaking the DOM via CSS/JS, or general Javascript development, this extension is - quite frankly - a must have extension for your workflow. Firebug takes some of the favorite staples of the Web Developers' Toolbar (link below) such as CSS/HTML visualization, the ability to introspect your HTML/CSS/JS assets, and adds some must-have......

1111 of 1492 | News: Apple buys asset management company Proximity - Apple has extended its stable of technologies with the purchase on Monday of Proximity. The company's flagship product is artbox, an all-in-one asset management and workflow. ...

1112 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 1026 - Two appears to be the age of snuggle. Secret Server 2.0 - New version of this Web-based application for securely storing and sharing secrets across an organization. Trial download is here, pricing from $45 per user. Final version of ‘My Web Pages Starter Kit’ is here - Learn ASP.NET with this basic free CMS. View XML Files Easily with XmlGridViewControl - Prettyprint or grid view for your XML files in WinForms apps. Internet Explorer 6 Application Compatibility VPC Image - It's back. Requires you to be running genuine Windows, and expires on April 1, but you can download a full......

1113 of 1492 | Windows Workflow, Windows Communication Foundation, and BizTalk Server 2006 - The BizTalk Server Developer Center has been updated to highlight integration with WF and WCF.http://msdn.microsoft.com/biztalk/ Windows Workflow and BizTalk Server 2006 Code SampleThis sample demonstrates how to integrate Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 and Windows Workflow Foundation through Web services.  Reference Application Pack for RetailThis white paper, along with the sample application, showcases integration using service orientation with BizTalk Server 2006, Windows Communication Foundation, and Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager. Windows Workflow Foundation OverviewWindows Workflow Foundation is the programming model, engine, and tools for quickly building workflow-ena......

1114 of 1492 | Developing wireless workflow automation client on Pocket PC/PDAs with web service in C# 2003. - This article focuses on devloping a device application for pocket pc....

1115 of 1492 | Review: SQL Refactor - 0.2 Review: SQL Refactor SQL Refactor, $295 Red Gate Software Cambridge, UK (866) 733 4283 / +44 (0)870 160 0037 http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Refactor/index.htm I'm actually moderately surprised that it's taken this long for a tool like this to appear: a refactoring tool for T-SQL code, tightly integrated with Microsoft's SQL Server Management Studio (and capable of working with either SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005 databases, so long as you open them via SSMS). The basic notion of refactoring is to make changes ......

1116 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 1021 - A slow day yesterday, of course, but here are a few links to end the week. SpamStopsHere - Proxy MX server service that filters out spam before it hits your servers. I recently switched to them and they're doing a fabulous job for under $300 a year. If you're like me, with your own domain and a well-publicized e-mail address that's been harvested by the spambots a million times, this is well worth looking into. Ubuntu 6.10 - And while we're on the subject of things that just work, I'm enjoying playing around with this version of Linux and seeing which of my daily activities I can move off of a Windows desktop. hMail......

1117 of 1492 | New and Notable 127 - I thought Thanksgiving morning is for adults to be sleeping in. Instead, not only are the kids up at the crack at dawn but one (the eight year old) is playing games on Vista and asking for Starbucks, while the nearly 4 year old is clamoring for princess attention. And Angus is eating hats and everything else he can find.... CLR/Rotor Today, we begin where it all started...1999 for me and the CLR with the very welcome addition of a new CLR blogger Patrick Dussand who is the Lead Architect of the CLR/UIFX group and the Chief Architect of the .NET Frameworks. He relates How it All Started...Aka The Birth of the CLR. Since we haven't heard from Chris Brumme in a while, here's hoping ......

1118 of 1492 | Open-jACOB Draw2D - Open-jACOB Draw2D is a JavaScript library that allows you to create drawings and diagrams. The User interface allows interactive drawing by using your standard browser. No additional software; no third party plug ins. Just run it and use it. Open-jACOB Draw2D is the graph component of the Open-jACOB online Workflow editor. The purpose of this experiment is to see if a Visio-type workflow editor tool could be developed in a web browser - It is possible. Check out an interactive demo. ...

1119 of 1492 | Podcasts and Prototyping - Ron Jacobs recently published a podcast with me for his ARCast.net show (which is a free Podcast series aimed at architects).  In the podcast we covered a couple of topics people might find interesting: Some of the history behind .NET and specifically ASP.NET The importance of prototyping (and how not to screw it up) The importance of developing "soft skills" to be a successful architect The prototyping discussion is one that I think has a lot of relevance to many projects out there.  It is a best practice that I really encourage all developers to dedicate more time towards -- since done right it really allows you to experiment and quickly try out a lot of ideas and conce......

1120 of 1492 | Monthly Themes for the Dev Center - We are currently on track to publish new or highlight existing content based around the following themes. Is there other content you would like to see?   Month Dev Center Dec WorkFlow Jan Security Feb Pipeline March Application Development...

1121 of 1492 | News: Apple Remote Desktop 3.1 fixes AppleScript issues - Apple Remote Desktop features fixes for AppleScript and Automator workflows, compatibility with third-party VNC viewers and servers and various other fixes. ...

1122 of 1492 | Back From Barcelona - I arrived into SEA yesterday around 3, so I'm feeling a little bit of the 'lag from my week in Barcelona.  A few things to point out: Tim has a fantastic "Vista on the M400" post.  The little dude's getting an upgrade while this gets typed, results in a future post Kudos to who-ever put together this diagram.  I think it could be made a bit better by having links to the section of MSDN which further explains how to dev, say, win32 or hybrid applications, but it's a nice way to represent and download the bits you're interested in.  The long awaited WF perf whitepaper is available, as Paul points out.  As Paul mentions, the 10K empty workflows per second is not ......

1123 of 1492 | Hello, WF! - Explains the very basics of Windows Workflow Foundation, using The World's Stupidest WF Application....

1124 of 1492 | Not the Perfect Time Tracking Tool - The last post received some very interesting comments, and even a few mentions of specific time tracking systems that our readers use. As a process and methodology fanatic, I’m always interested in any tools that can help me to be more efficient – especially if they are related to time management. Personally, I’ve only had success with two time tracking systems. The first was Microsoft Excel, which means we didn’t really use a ‘system’ at all. Instead, we had a standard spreadsheet form that each employee would complete and submit every Friday. This crude system worked well because it was flexible, easy, and required no maintenance or training. Unfortunately, it still required an administ......

1125 of 1492 | WF Performance Article is Live! - We just published a WF performance whitepaper. Get it here. Thanks to Marc Mezquita, Paul Andrew, Paul Maybee, Don McCrady, Bernard Pham, Don Spencer, Joel West, and David Wrede for releasing such a great paper.  ...

1126 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 1011 - Hail yesterday, snow tomorrow. I think I'll stay in and write code. Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth - An online photo viewing application that wants you to have IE6 or IE7, a Vista Aero ready graphics card, and 1 GB of RAM. I'm not exactly overwhelmed, but your mileage may vary. Zamzar - Free service for online file conversion, supporting many different image, doc, music, and video formats. (via Postbubble) DataDefractor - SSIS data source component for working with unstructured and semi-structured Excel, CSV, and text files. Now in free beta. 2007 Microsoft Office System Update: Redistri......

1127 of 1492 | .Net Framework 3.0 is live! - Microsoft .Net Framework 3.0 is now officially live. Click here for download links for various related components; the runtime components, Visual Studio Extensions, and the Windows SDK. The .Net Framework 3.0 contains Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, and Windows CardSpace. ...

1128 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 1006 - Remember, November is National Novel Writing Month. Quintara - New search engine that lets you quickly refine results by pointing to words in a cloud. It actually works surprisingly well and quickly. Your Next Action is: Download NextAction! - A free self-management application with as few features as possible. Code Co-op 5.0 Preview - This peer-to-peer version control system is adding a peer-to-peer wiki, bug database, and support for branching and merging. Free SlickEdit® Gadgets - Some Visual Studio add-ins from the SlickEdit folks. IT'S HERE!!! OnTime 2007 Web Beta (Hosted-Only for now) - New rev of this spiff......

1129 of 1492 | thinktecture @ TechEd Europe Developers - It's that time of the year again and in a few days, the European thinktects will get together at Microsoft's biggest gathering of developers in Europe. This time, we have a pretty intense schedule:MondayPRE008, 12:00 - 19:00, Ingo Rammer and Christian Weyer, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) - Free Workflow Support for your ApplicationsWednesdayDEV001, 13:30 - 14:45, Neno Loje, DEMO: Adopting ClickOnce for Real World ApplicationsThursdayDEVWD15, 09:00 - 10:15, Ingo Rammer, Hardcore .NET Production DebuggingDEVWD17, 09:00 - 10:15, Neno Loje, Team System Adoption Best PracticesDEVWD15, 13:30 - 14:45, Ingo Rammer, Hardcore .NET Production Debugging (repeat)DEVWD17, 15:45 - 17:00, Neno Loje, Tea......

1130 of 1492 | News: Aperture 1.5.1, demo download, new RAW support coming today - Apple will release Aperture 1.5.1 — its professional photography workflow application — later today, the company said from PhotoPlus Expo being held in New York this week. Apple also said it would release a fully functioning demo of Aperture and new camera RAW support. ...

1131 of 1492 | Two Types of Service Architects? - I was goinng to respond to Harry's responses made to Tomas and mine, but Tomas already responded and said everything I would have said:I agree with Tomas that I consider Service Broker a good match for applications with code only in the database, even though it supports more than code completly in the database (I made improper wording in my post indicating it did not)I agree with Tomas that there is a world of difference between "access a database" (99% of apps) vs. database-driven (see Tomas' definition). I said I tend away from these kinds of architectures these days as I see the power of domain-driven architectures (see Nilson). Obviously, there is no one......

1132 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 1001 - After Satori, chop wood, carry water. TallPDF.NET 3.0 - New version of this .NET component for generating PDF documents can now import existing PDFs and generate form fields. Trial download is here, pricing from $499. iNetFormFiller 3.5 - Tool for automatically filling out Web forms, with various bells and whistles. Trial download is here, pricing from $599.95. Hawkeye - I can see your SecureStrings! - The Hawkeye tool for .NET application spelunking continues to move along. Now it can decipher SecureString contents and inject IPrincipal objects. The new functionality comes at a......

1133 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 1000 - We made it. Thanks to everyone who has read an contributed to the Daily Grind over the years. Contest winners will be announced tomorrow. Net Meter - Fancy graphical display to track bytes moving in and out of your machine. Looks fun if you're easily distracted by shiny things. Download trial here, $19.95 to register. (via Programmers Heaven) MyLife Organized - Outliner and to-do manager with PocketPC, OutLook, and MindManager synchronization capabilities. Download here, pricing from $45.95. (via Dennis Gurock) ScrewTurn Wiki 1.0 - Free C#/ASP.NET 2.0 wiki. (via Ja......

1134 of 1492 | Workflow Ping Activity (Logged in as: staceyw) - Worked up a WF Ping activity and posted it on C9 with source.  Link to Workflow Ping Activity (Logged in as: staceyw)...

1135 of 1492 | Essential Windows Workflow Foundation - Dharma and Bob's WF book has now shipped. After having watched Dharma birth both the technology and the book at the same time, I have to say that it's amazing how quickly he got his figure back :-) If you're even considering using WF, go buy a copy now....

1136 of 1492 | Greg Rewis on Website Workflow - Greg Rewis is currently demoing a workflow between Photoshop and Fireworks. I believe the Dreamweaver he launched is beta, named Hanzo (name the flic "Hanzo" is from for the win!). Nice, he just showed how you can copy and paste from Photoshop and paste in Dreamweaver. When you do, it brings up the Fireworks image export prompt to optimize it, and then embed it. He's also showing the Spry, Adobe's AJAX framework, integration wtih Dreamweaver. You can see the binding tags, like {myDate}, on the Dreamweaver preview. It has some integration with the existing Dreamweaver javascript effects....

1137 of 1492 | This is the Week - Assuming we don't have a sudden meteor strike in Endicott or something, The Daily Grind #1000 will be published on Thursday, and I'll draw the winners for the contest. Watch for them to be posted on Friday. I can hardly believe it myself. Contest Rules There are two ways that you can enter the contest: At the top of the Larkware home page you'll see the new "tell a friend" feature. Every time you refer someone to the site using this feature, your own e-mail address will be entered in a prize drawing that will be conducted when I publish #1000. You can also enter by nominating a .NET-related weblog entry on someone else's web......

1138 of 1492 | Mac OS X Hints: Add Spotlight comments via Automator - Use a simple Automator workflow to add Spotlight Comments to many files at once. ...

1139 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 996 - We're looking for tech writers who know ASP.NET...again...still... Easily Add a string resource with CoolCommands - Gaston Milano puts another feature into Visual Studio that Microsoft forgot. WebSnapr - Service to capture screenshot thumbnails of Web pages. It's been dugg, so it'll probably be smashed into oblivion by the time you read this. Hawkeye 1.1.10 - Multi Platform (x86 + x64) in one - New release of this tool for digging around in running .NET applications. ISO Recorder V3 - This tool for burning CDs and DVDs is now out for Windows Vista. (via Chris Johnson) ......

1140 of 1492 | My New Blog - Two things have happened which made me think I needed a second blog: My job has changed slightly so I've got a few non-workflow things to say now. I wanted a place where I didn't feel obligated to stick to work related topics. Let me introduce to you http://SharedMemory.spaces.live.com.  It's just a place for me to post the interesting non-workflow things that I come across at work as well as any other random technical thoughts that come to mind. Enjoy. Nate...

1141 of 1492 | Business Rules Forum - Both Moustafa and I will be at the Business Rules Forum during November in Washington D.C. If you're going and are interested in chatting up about rules and feedback on BRE or WF Rules, we would love to meet up with you. Please contact us through this blog and we can set up a time to meet with you during that time. -Kavita...

1142 of 1492 | Tuning WF Rules Performance - I posted this on my blog today after we saw a question about this on the WF MSDN forums. In future releases we are looking at providing more analysis capabilities on your rules which should make a lot easier for you to tune your rules. -Kavita...

1143 of 1492 | Last Chance - If you've been dragging your feet about entering the Larkware 1000 contest, it's time to stop dragging. Next week I hit #1000 and draw the winners. Good luck! Contest Rules There are two ways that you can enter the contest: At the top of the Larkware home page you'll see the new "tell a friend" feature. Every time you refer someone to the site using this feature, your own e-mail address will be entered in a prize drawing that will be conducted when I publish #1000. You can also enter by nominating a .NET-related weblog entry on someone else's weblog that you think is especially useful. If you enter this way, both you and the ......

1144 of 1492 | News: QuarkXpress Print Server 7, Print Collection unveiled - Quark has introduced QuarkXPress Print Server 7, for automating Quark print and production workflows, and Quark Print Collection, a set of four prepress tools. ...

1145 of 1492 | Rules rules! - Hello everyone, I wanted to follow up on Kavita's great kickoff with an introduction as well. I'm Moustafa Khalil Ahmed, a Program Manager on the Connected Frameworks Rules Team. I have a blog here that talks mainly about .Net framework 3.0, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and WF Rules. I've been in Microsoft for almost 6 years. I've been working on WF since the incubation and before that I worked on various Business Process Management products at Microsoft including BizTalk Server and Commerce Server.   As Kavita mentioned, there will be a few people contributing regularly to this blog in the hopes that together we can provide our perspective on WF Rules and Business Rules in ge......

1146 of 1492 | Dreamforce wrap up - Dreamforce is over for another year, a hectic, fun packed few days, the highlights for me were Finally announcing the API 8.0 features, this is probably the most significant API version with the possible exception of the original release of the doc/literal SOAP API (back at API v2.5). There's a ton of good stuff in there including being able to query over relationships between objects, being able to resolve foreign keys using externalIds during upsert, having workflow trigger soap notifications, merge, undelete, and numerious additional improvements to SOQL, SOSL and metedata describes. Getting my hands on a copy of the new building applications book, it looks really good, and includes a s......

1147 of 1492 | The Daily Grind 991 - Survived another week, hooray! FtpPublisher, An FTP file synchronization tool - Synchronize a local folder to a remote site based on which local files have changed. VistaDB 3 - Still not final, but the feature set of this fully-managed SQL database keeps getting longer, now including support for CLR functions and stored procedures. GridFTP.NET and GRAM.NET - Code to help .NET clients interoperate with some popular scientific grid software.(via Dan Fay) Final Review: The Lowdown on Office 2007 - Long review from ComputerWorld. They're sort of lukewarm on the new version. Snake Oil-orien......

1148 of 1492 | .NET Framework 3.0 eLearning clinics - Free Until the Launch of .NET 3.0! - This collection of 3 2-hour premium clinics teaches about the new capabilities provided by the .NET Framework 3.0. These clinics are for experienced Developers and Software Architects who are looking to adopt Microsoft's next generation technology within their solutions. Topics covered within the collection include: • Windows Presentation Foundation • Windows Workflow Foundation • Windows Communication Foundation Don't procrastinate you don't have much time to grab these for free and once you have them they are valid for 1 year! Quick tip... log in to eLearning first and then don't change the "Prices for the United States are shown in US Dollars." dropdown......

1149 of 1492 | CodeDom Quirks -   I'm going to talk a little bit here about the expression model used by WF rules, and some of the idiosyncrasies, caveats, and downright quirks that arise from our chosen expression model.   First, a little history.  Rather than (re)inventing our own private Rule expression object model, the WF Rules team opted to leverage an existing expression model, namely CodeDom.  CodeDom was originally intended as an object model for code emitters: i.e., VS-based designers like WinForms, and the like.  The object model forms an abstraction that enables these designers to target C# and VB developers without having to bake language-specific notions into their tools.  ......

1150 of 1492 | Epiware - Ajax Enabled Document Management - Document Management — or, if you’re charging $400 an hour, Knowledge Management — is the domain of some very expensive software packages, such as OpenText Livelink, Documentum and FileNet. These vendors pack so much meta information into their systems — permissions, audit information, tags, creator, owner, modifier, etc., etc. — that manipulating it all is a usability nightmare. Managing files or groups of files using a series of forms, frames and popups results in a veritable festival of clicking. I know of one instance where a company delegated the reorganization of a tree of resources in Livelink 9.5 to a small army of offshore folks. It would seem that Ajax is a natural fit for simpli......