Windows Workflow Foundation 3

Windows Workflow Foundation 3 Types Marked Obsolete in .NET 4.5

By Maurice de Beijer

People have been wondering for a while what the future of WF3 was since the release of WF4. So far both workflow stacks have coexisted in .NET 4 and there has been no official statement about the future of the older WF3 stack.   That has just changed! The workflow team at Microsoft has just announced that they are marking the WF3 stack as deprecated with the next release of the .NET framework, .NET 4.5. Of course the types are still there but you will get compile time  warnings for using them and you can expect the classes to be … Continue reading Windows Workflow Foundation 3 Types Marked Obsolete in .NET 4.5

What’s New in Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.5 (part 3)

By Maurice de Beijer

This is the 3rd post about what is new with Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.5 as announced at the //build/ conference. See also part 1 about the designer enhancements and part 2 about the other runtime enhancements.   This 3rd post is about one of the biggest missing pieces which is versioning workflows. To understand why this is so painful at the moment it is important to remember that workflow instances often run for a long time. And that is not just a long time in computer terms, like a few minutes, but a long time in human terms … Continue reading What’s New in Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.5 (part 3)

What’s New in Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.5 (part 2)

By Maurice de Beijer

During the last //build/ conference a number of new WF4.5 features where announced. In part 1 I took a look at the designer improvements, in this blog post I am going to take a look at some of the runtime enhancements.   New activities. As part of WF 4.5 we will see some new activities in the box. The number isn’t earth shattering but as I always tell people WF activities are all about your business and Microsoft can’t create activities tailored to your business, you need to do so yourself. One useful new activity is the NoPersistScope. Not that … Continue reading What’s New in Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.5 (part 2)

What’s New in Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.5 (part 1)

By Maurice de Beijer

During the last //build/ conference a number of new WF4, or should I now say WF4.5, features where announced. While the list of new features isn’t earth shattering long some of the most annoying shortcomings where addressed.   Designer enhancements As a developer I spend a lot of time in the designer so any improvements there are going to make me happy. And I am very happy to see some of the new features.   Auto surround with a Sequence. This seemingly small feature is a real time saver. There are lots of places where an activity has a child … Continue reading What’s New in Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.5 (part 1)

Guerrilla Enterprise .NET Copenhagen

By Maurice de Beijer

For those that attended the Guerrilla Enterprise .NET course last week in Copenhagen and didn’t get a change to download all the sample you can download all the demos Richard Blewett, Dominick Baier and I wrote from here. And thanks for being there, it was a fun event 🙂

SqlWorkflowInstanceStore and SQL Azure

By Maurice de Beijer

Some time ago I blogged about how to get the SqlWorkflowInstanceStore working with SQL Azure. In order for this to work we had to make a few changes to the SqlWorkflowInstanceStoreSchema.sql script and as a result we ended up in a working but officially not supported scenario. And while this worked just fine with the Windows Azure 1.2 SDK there was a change in the Windows Azure 1.3 SDK which resulted in each deployment being seen in a new service deployment. This last change even happened if no change was made to the workflow service or the assemblies but resulted … Continue reading SqlWorkflowInstanceStore and SQL Azure

WF4 State Machine in the Multi-Targeting Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1

By Maurice de Beijer

Lots of people like to use the state machine model workflow as this is a very flexible way of working that often fits in with how real work processes work. With WF3 we had a state machine workflow but with WF4 this was not ready in time and as a result we didn’t get to use this model. There where a few whitepapers on how to do a state machine using a flowchart and for simple cases those worked quite well. Microsoft also released an implementation of the state machine for WF4 on CodePlex and while that worked quite well … Continue reading WF4 State Machine in the Multi-Targeting Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1

Scheduling child activities with input parameters

By Maurice de Beijer

A question on StackOverflow about scheduling child activities with some additional input parameters made me remember that this is kind on not obvious to figure out and even though I new the answer I had to think hard before I could code up a demo. So I figured I might as well post it on my blog for future reference.   The problem is that activities are normally just scheduled and their inputs and outputs are configured using Visual Basic expressions. Most of the time that is just fine and does exactly what you need. However in some cases, as … Continue reading Scheduling child activities with input parameters

Workflow Services and Windows Phone 7

By Maurice de Beijer

Today I did a fun presentation at the Engineering World Conference in the Netherlands on using the Windows Phone 7 with a Workflow Service hosted on Windows Azure. The sample application, that is complete with all source on CodePlex over here, consists of an expense app on the phone and an ASP.NET MVC site hosting the workflow service. The PowerPoint presentation can be found here. It was a fun session on a fun event   [f1] [f2]

The SqlWorkflowInstanceStore and Windows Azure

By Maurice de Beijer

As shown previously it isn’t hard to run Workflow Services on Windows Azure. In fact all we need to do is add a bit of extra configuration and we can work as normal. However normally when I am hosting long running workflows in IIS I always add a SqlWorkflowInstanceStore  to store the workflow state when it is not running so we can survive the inevitable IIS AppDomain restarts. Unfortunately this isn’t quite as straightforward as I had hoped.   SQL Azure != SQL Server The important thing to remember is that SQL Azure might be similar to SQL Server but … Continue reading The SqlWorkflowInstanceStore and Windows Azure