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 you do changes will not be applied. I am not sure...
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 well using the StateMachineWorkflowInstance.SetState...
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 all the dependencies here with the extra dummy workflow...
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 object is first created using one of the...
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 we would want to modify an already running workflow...
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 time and only for a limited set of properties. First...
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 { } The validator class now look like this: class...
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 I have to it just wastes a lot of bandwidth and...
Posted to
The Problem Solver
(Weblog)
by
Maurice
on
05-16-2008
Filed under: .NET, LINQ, NetFx3, Workflow, VSTO, WCF, VB, DevCenter, ClickOnce, WPF, SqlCe
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 Dutch DevDays . I am happy to say that amongst 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 the favor The default looks like this. So changing...