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 are sealed mocking them with another mocking...
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...
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...
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...
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 Foundation book I am reading now does so. Just to...
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 the behavior I have created a very small workflow...
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 they are pretty much limited to text, html and...