I will be presenting ‘The Role of Workflow in Enterprise Software’ at the Calgary .NET User Group on October 26th.  The presentation will cover workflow concepts, Windows Workflow Foundation 4 (WF4), and will also touch on Entity Framework Code First.

More details and registration at www.dotnetcalgary.com

See you all there!

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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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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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One of the big complaints with the version of Windows Workflow Foundation that shipped in .NET 3 and .NET 3.5 (WF3) was that it was very difficult to unit test workflows. Unit testing workflows was not impossible, but it was very difficult and required a lot of code to setup the workflow runtime and manage your workflow. Since unit testing workflows in WF3 was clumsy and awkward, many developers chose to either not unit test their workflows, or just avoid using WF3 all together. I am very happy to ......

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When working with Workflow projects in Visual Studio, you can add Sequential Workflows, State Machine Workflows, and Activities to a project by right clicking on the project and selecting Add > Sequential Workflow..., Add > State Machine Workflow.., or Add > Activity... menu options. The problem I run into is that these menu options are only available if you selected one of the Workflow project templates when adding the project to your solution. How can we add workflows to existing projects ......

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I will be presenting on Windows Workflow Foundation at Calgary Techfest this Saturday. This is a free event organized by the Calgary .NET User Group. If you're in the area, you should stop by.

Register at www.calgarytechfest.org

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