Sometimes I wonder... Other times I know.: October 2005

Sometimes I wonder... Other times I know.

Thursday, October 27, 2005

"Fight the Bull -- Why Business People Speak Like Idiots"

One of the benefits of working at Microsoft is that we're provided the opportunity to attend lectures by various authors, researchers, lawyers etc etc

Today, Brian Fugere & Chelsea Hardaway gave a talk applying the principles of their book to Microsoft.

Microsofties (especially marketing folks) need to check this out... go to http://resnet and search for them....

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 7:00 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Cranking away at Beta 2

As you'd expect, after releasing Beta1 at PDC we're hard at work with Beta2 and thus I haven't had a chance to do my blogging.

There are a few blog entries I promise I'll write. Here are the tenative titles and short abstracts.

"WF in practice: does it really save me code?" - I'd write comparable applications using the WF framework versus straight C# for common workflow scenarios. (this was requested by Chris)
"The lifetime of an activity" - Basically write up the activity execution states + a description of when you implement each method. Slide 11 from the PDC2005 custom activity talk (requested by Savas on an internal alias)
"Advanced Activity constructs: Activity Execution Context" - when do you use them? How? Why? Advantages/Disadvantages
"Correlation in Local Services" - The second part to the Local Services blog entry I wrote earlier dealing with ordered delivery of messages.

Anyone care to comment which one should go first?

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 8:11 PM 7 comments

Monday, October 24, 2005

"Hello from Field readiness"

"Hi..."

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 7:46 AM 0 comments

Monday, October 17, 2005

Chris drills into Workflow Communications..

I spent some time with Chris on Friday and over the weekend explaining our activity binding as it applies communications based activities (EventSink and InvokeMethod).

He was kind enough to document his experiences in two parts... I would highly recommend reading part one and part two to get a another explanation of Local Communication Services.

The short version: Chris wanted an the property of activity which executed "downstream" in the workflow to be set to an EventSink activity. However, the EventSink activity exposes a ParameterBindings collection which can't be directly bound to in Beta1.

(Remember, activity bindings only work for activities whose properties are of the same type)

However, using WCA.exe (found in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Workflow Foundation) you can generate "strongly typed" activities which derive from EventSink and InvokeMethod... and then bind to them from your downstream activity..

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 9:35 AM 0 comments

Friday, October 14, 2005

Code for the EventSink & InvokeMethod sample..

A few people have asked for the code I used to illustrate the sample below. To illustrate the communications, I've removed the conditional and rules logic. Here it is..

This workflow uses an EventSink activity to get some data from the host. It pulls the data which was passed from the host

this.eventSinkActivity1.ParameterBindings["LoanID"].Value.ToString();

and outputs it to the console.

Then, before returning to the data to the host, it updates the data to include the text "from the workflow" and sends to back to the host.

Let me know if you have any questions..

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 8:38 AM 0 comments

Thursday, October 13, 2005

After these messages

I'm back.

Over the last two weeks I've been focusing on a number of things as we get close to the end of Beta2....the bits you received at PDC were Beta1.

We had a conference on campus where we spent serious time with Solution Integrators explaining Windows Workflow Foundation. I had one session and received some very intelligent questions.

Last week I spent large chunks of my time preparing the tasks and sitting in the usability labs watching developers play with our APIs. What a fantastic learning experience... it was great to have Steven Clarke sit in and provide his feedback as well. James dropped by and took some video... that'll be posted soon.

I've seen Chris start posting some good questions on an internal alias and he's posted a blog entry which I'm watching as well.

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