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In a previous blog post I demonstrated how TypeMock allowed us to mock out the workflow runtime infrastructure and create true unit tests for a workflow activity. Now this may not seems like a big deal but because most of the classes in the workflow runtime...
Using an ActivityDesignerTheme is a quick way to customize the appearance of an activity in the workflow designer. But there is a gotcha Because once you applied the theme and have a workflow with the custom activity open in the designer no matter what...
When working with state machine workflow's the SetStateActivity is one of the more important activities to use. The main reason is that is the one used to transition from one state to another. You can actually transition state in a different way as...
Most people consider unit testing of custom workflow activities to pretty much impossible. Sure you can create a dummy test workflow containing your new activity, new up a WorkflowRuntime , create a WorkflowInstance and start it. But just think about...
As I mentioned in my previous blog post adding a custom ActivityValidator class to an activity validates it at runtime as well as at design time. So when is this runtime validation done and what happens when it fails? The when part is when the WorkflowInstance...
Modifying already executing workflow's is a very powerful option. Now, as with most advanced options, not something you are going to need every day but certainly something to be aware of and use when the needed. First lets take a quick look at why...
There are several options for validating properties on a custom activity. Besides the possibility of using an ActivityValidator as described here we can also use the ValidationOptionAttribute. Now the ValidationOptionAttribute isn't useful all the...
Create a derived class from ActivityValidator and add it to your custom activity using the ActivityValidatorAttribute. For example: [ ActivityValidator ( typeof ( ValidatedActivityValidator ))] public partial class ValidatedActivity : SequenceActivity...
VS2008 SP1 Beta is quite a package. By default the installation downloads the packages as needed and when needed. Now that is just fine if you only need to install a single machine. But when you need to install multiple, possibly virtual, machines like...
The Dutch Microsoft office has posted the first of the Community DevCast we recorded. The host is Alex Thissen who actually does most of the work as he also edits the screencasts so don't forget to thank him next week when you run into him at the...
By default every custom workflow activity shows the same icon. And using an icon that help understand what the activity actually does makes life so much easier for the user of your activity. And remember he is a developer so some day he might just return...
For some reason a lot of people seem to think that only a single WorkflowRuntime object can be created in an AppDomain. And it isn't just the average Joe out there who seems to think so, no even book authors describe this behavior as the Workflow...
The ReplicatorActivity is one of the more interesting Workflow Foundation activities to work with when you have a collection of data and want to iterate over each item. Basically just think of it as a For Each statement in regular code. To demonstrate...
Visual Studio visualizers are pretty cool and can help you quite a bit when debugging but you need to develop them and that just ads to the workload. So how about having someone else do it? Well Microsoft added a few visualizers to VS2008 and VS2008 but...
Sometimes you can get these kinds of errors using the new Workflow Foundation ReceiveActivity when property binding the incoming value. So why does this happen Well it appears the validation is comparing the type of the original interface to to the type...
LINQ to SQL has a really nice feature when making sample and demos in the ability to create the database if it doesn't exist yet. It also has a function called DatabaseExists() to check if a database exists. Both are defined on the DataContext class...
Sometimes you just want to be able to create a workflow in code bus save it as a XOML workflow so the end user has the opportunity to modify it. Well it turns out to be quite easy as the WorkflowMarkupSerializer class is your friend. The following code...
The new ReceiveActivity and SendActivity that marry Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) are really cool . Getting started is easy because a new Sequential Workflow Service Library, found under WCF instead of Workflow...
In a previous blog post I showed how to use the ReceiveActivity with long running workflow and how to extract the workflow instanceId from the context using the IContextManager. I also showed how to rebuild this context at a later date when you use a...
In my last post I showed how to self host the workflow runtime and still be able to use a Windows Communication Foundation and ReceiveActivity. Hosting the workflow runtime in a WorkflowServiceHost is nice but in all likelihood you will also need to configure...
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