For those who attended my presentation at Prairie Dev Con West today, you can find my slides and sample project here: https://skydrive.live.com/?... For those who did not attend my presentation, I will follow this up with a more detailed post ......

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Lately, I have been taking some time to learn some new technologies. For me, the best way to learn a new technology is to jump head first into a project: Daily deal websites such as GroupOn, LivingSocial, DealFind, etc. have really taken off over the last 6 months. With so many sites out there, my inbox was being flooded with emails from all these daily deal websites. This seemed like it might be a fun project, so I set out to build a daily deal aggregator. First, I built a Windows Phone 7 app. I ......

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If you are like me, you may have been surprised when you read the MSDN documentation for System.Activities.Statement... A Parallel activity operates by simultaneously scheduling each Activity in its Branches collection at the start. It completes when all of its Branches complete or when its CompletionCondition property evaluates to true. While all the Activity objects run asynchronously, they do not execute on separate threads, so each successive activity only executes when the previously ......

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On October 19th, Craig Anderson, Jason Lepp and Mo Khan will be presenting “From MVP to MVVM: An Introduction to Model-View-ViewModel”. Register at http://tiny.cc/flu0b ......

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On May 12th, Aaron Kowall (Microsoft Developer Solutions Technical Specialist) will be presenting “What’s New in Team Foundation Server 2010”.

Register at http://tinyurl.com/3322k99

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If you’re in Calgary, come join us on April 28th, 2010.  Habib Heydarian (Principal Program Manager Lead, Microsoft) will be presenting the new debugging features in Visual Studio 2010 including IntelliTrace, multi-tier performance analysis, importing/exporting breakpoints and many other features.

Register at www.dotnetcalgary.com.

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One of my previous posts talked about the performance improvements in WF4. With the recent release of Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 RC1, I thought I would re-run my performance tests to see if there have been any further improvements with the most recent version. My test is simply timing how long it takes to invoke an empty workflow (an Sequence activity that does nothing) 2,000,000 times. This test gives us a good idea of the overhead of invoking a workflow. With .NET 4.0 RC1, I am able to invoke ......

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I just finished watching a great video about WF4 from Microsoft PDC.  The session is WF4 from the Inside Out by Bob Schmidt.  I think he did a great job explaining how the runtime is implemented in WF4.

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I have been playing around with the idea of modeling business rules as a set of small workflows (Flowcharts in WF4). In the application, this would result in small workflows being called a large number of times. I decided to investigate the performance overhead of invoking a workflow in WF4, the workflow technology in .NET 4. Since I am using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2, this also seemed like a good opportunity to evaluate the performance profiler included in this edition of VS 2010. For this ......

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Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 to the general public (MSDN subscribers have been able to download it for a few days now). I am currently in the process of installing it. In particular, I'm interested in seeing the changes to WF4. Check out Matt Winkler's blog posting describing the WF4 Changes Between Beta 1 and Beta 2 ......

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