Developers often say that there is a steep learning curve with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4). I won't deny that... instead, allow me to share three simple rules that will help you to get over…

With WF3, a lot of people wrote apps that enabled/disabled controls based on the current state of a StateMachine and the possible transitions but to do this with WF4 you had to write a fair bit of…

Imagine you want to create a library that supports different versions of .NET. Of course there are multiple ways to do this but this is the technique that I have adopted for my CodePlex projects. In…

What do you do if you want to store state in an activity? Use a field? Be careful—you can get into trouble. In this episode, I show you the right way to manage state in Workflow Activities using…

In this episode I'll show you our new and improved activities for loading XAML and invoking child workflows. About 6 months ago we did a first release of these activities and the feedback came back…

Create custom activities with Windows Workflow Foundation is easy, but creating a fully featured activity designer is not quite as easy. In this episode I'll show you the tips and tricks of creating…

In this video Steve Danielson, a Programming Writer on the WF team, gives a walkthrough of the WF4 State Machine Getting Started Tutorial from the MSDN documentation. Links Getting Started Tutorial…

Wondering how you can secure your Workflow Service? On this episode, I'm joined by Dave Cliffe who explains how Workflow Security works with WCF Security. Links: Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) -…

What happens to a Workflow if an attacker can lure the workflow host into running XAML which references an assembly replaced by the attacker? This is what I call an Activity Assembly Spoofing attack.…

Customers often ask me How can I store my Workflow Service definitions (xamlx files) in a database with IIS and AppFabric? On this episode I'll show you how you can create a VirtualPathProvider that…

Wizards are a part of the web. Maybe you haven't thought of them as wizards, but multi-step processes such as checkout or registration are utilized by many websites. In this episode, Muhammad Usman…

Our friends in the ASP.NET team have built a very cool infrastructure known a Nuget. It is a really great way to bring libraries that you want to use into your project. When I first saw it I thought…

If you want to get deep inside State Machine and understand how it works this episode is for you. I'm going to show you the details of how it schedules, executes and cancels child activities. For…

Have you ever wanted to create a Workflow that starts when the system boots, does some work and at the same time responds to query and stop messages? In this episode I'll show you the Windows…

In this episode I'm going to show you exercise 4 of the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) - Introduction to State Machine Hands On Lab. In this exercise we implement the Main Menu scenario where we…

In this episode I'm going to show you exercise 3 of the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) - Introduction to State Machine Hands On Lab. In this exercise we implement the PIN Entry scenario where we…

In this episode I'm going to show you exercise 2 of the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) - Introduction to State Machine Hands On Lab. In this exercise we implement the Card Inserted scenario with a…

In this episode I'm going to show you exercise 1 of the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) - Introduction to State Machine Hands On Lab. In this exercise we will focus on States and Entry / Exit…

The Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) State Machine activity has officially shipped in the .NET Framework Platform Update 1 bits. In this episode I'll show you what you need to download to get…

In the next installment of the Versioning Spike Series I'm going to walk you through my test application that demonstrates the use of Promoted Properties to store extra information I need to make a…

Versioning is always a hard problem. When you add to this problem long running workflows then it gets really tricky. In this series I'm exploring possible solutions for versioning workflows and…

Versioning is a hard problem. I have to admit I've been slow to address this but I've finally had enough. We have to come up with some kind of solution for you. At this point I don't have the…

Suppose you have a workflow that needs to call another workflow. How do you do it? In this episode, I show you how to do so by using the InvokeWorkflow activity of the Microsoft.Activities project.…

I recently received an email from an endpoint.tv viewer asking a question about why his Workflow Service didn't work properly. He sent me a repro and I could see that it wasn't working right but it…

I'm committed to building better samples. In this episode I'm going to show you a new sample for WF4 Collection Activities and some of the new things we are doing to make better samples for you. Ron…

In this episode I'm joined by Leon Welicki who will show ushow you can create your own custom control flow activities for Windows WorkflowFoundation (WF4). …

Did you know by making one simple change you could improve the performance of your workflows by an order of magnitude? In this episode I'll show you some tips and tricks for making your workflows…

In this episode I'll show you an experimental API prototype I created which allows you to invoke a workflow as a task using System.Threading.Task. The benefit of doing this is you get a much simpler…

Yesterday morning I received an email from Ryo in Belgium who asked for help in unit testing a workflow. Ryo had read my previous posts on Microsoft.Activities.UnitTesting.XamlInjector and wanted to…

Last episode I shared with you some thoughts about my 4 Tenets of Service Oriented Data Validation and I showed an example of using them with WCF. In this episode I'll walk through an updated version…

Before yesterday I had never contemplated how I could unit test the behavior of a system to insure that the correct version of assemblies were loaded. But then after the previous episodes where I…

Last episode I shared with I found some surprising results about the way the WF4 resolves referenced assemblies in XAML. In this episode I'll show you the solution to this problem (also available on…

While doing a little spike project on XAML Activity Resolution I found some surpising results about the way the WF4 resolves referenced assemblies in XAML. In this episode I'll show you the results…

Suppose you have an activity that has an optional InArgument<int> and the default value you want to use with this argument is not the default for the type, in this case zero. In this case I…

I couldn't leave this one alone. While I was making the last episode I said that there was possibly another strategy for detecting states and transitions and that was to use Tracking data. In this…

In this episode I'll show you the new WF4 State Machine Driven WPF UI sample. This application uses a state machine to drive the UI enabling and disabling commands as the states change. I learned a…

This ought to be easy... unfortunately it is not as easy as it should be. In this episode I'll show you how you can consume a WCF service from WF4 by using a trick that I learned way back in the eary…

Windows Server AppFabric Caching is a great way to make your services more scalable by caching data in a distributed in-memory cache. I recently created a set of activities to expose the caching API…

In our last episode I showed you the Contoso HR sample application. The Submit Application workflow coordinated database updates, sending of email and multiple web service calls. How can you unit…

Wondering what the big deal is about Workflow? Wondering how you can use it to support a long running process in a web application? Want to see how Windows Server AppFabric can help? In this episode…

Suppose you want to create a workflow that needs to wait on a CLR event or callback. In this episode I'll show you how to create an Activity and a Workflow Extension that implements…

When we asked you what you wanted to see on endpoint.tv, one of the top three most requested topics was How to Unit Test Workflows.On this episode, I'll show you how to test Simple activities using…

In this episode, we discuss the FlowChart activity. Sure, it looks simple—and in fact it is. Watch as Leon Welicki explains how you can use the new WF4 Flowchart activity to build workflows.The sample…

After the previous episode on the WF Batch Job example went live many people asked me if there was a way to automatically start a batch job at system boot. There is a way and I described it inthis…

Sometimes you have work that you want to schedule for off-peak times or have happen on a recurring schedule, such as every 3 hours. While there are many ways to do this, Workflow Services are an…

Some of the big gaps with Workflow Services have been in the area of security. In this episode, we will see the new Workflow Services Security Activity pack, which fills these holes, allowing you to…

WorkflowServices don't provide a way to implement a contract, but that doesn't mean you can't get them to look like they do. This is useful if you want to create a client proxy using a ChannelFactory.…

One of the great things about using a Workflow is that you can define behaviors that will be applied when your workflow (or some part of it) is canceled.Activities, for example, can be canceled by the…

In this episode, Windows Workflow Foundation team Program Manager Leon Welicki drops in to show us the team's guidelines for developing custom activities. In Part 5, we cover more Activity Design…

I've created a new Hands On Lab prototype using the Feature Builder PowerTool for Visual Studio. In this epsiode I'll show you how you can download and get started with this hands on lab. I'd love…

People often ask me if there is a Silverlight version of the WF4 designer. Sadly the answer is no (at this moment) but if you want to get the WF4 designer in the brower you can do it as a WPF Browser…

In this episode, Windows Workflow Foundation team Program Manager Leon Welicki drops in to show us the team's guidelines for developing custom activities. In Part 4, we cover more Activity Design…

In this exercise, you will modify your SayHello activity to provide a generic greeting if the name is blank, otherwise it will provide a personalized greeting. The requirements for the SayHello…

In this exercise you will enhance your program and the SayHello activity to meet some new requirements. Generate a personalized greeting Provide unit tests to verify the personalized greeting Intro…

In this exercise, you will modify the host application to run your SayHello activity withWorkflowApplication and observe the threading behavior. You now have two requirements for your workflow. Return…

In the previous exercise you authored a new activity using the workflow designer and XAML. In this exercise you will create an activity that does the same thing in code. Intro To WF4 Hands On Lab…

In this exercise you will see how you can load a XAML file and create a dynamic activity from the XAML definition. This allows you to load XAML at runtime and invoke it like you would do a…

Even though you have a working application, you might want to make a few improvements. In this exercise, asWorkflow1 is not a very descriptive name, you will change it to SayHello and see how the…

Workflows execute a business process. Each step in that process is implemented by anActivity. In this exercise, you will create and test a simple "Hello World" process using Windows…