You can easily extend the functionality of the WF designer for your custom activities by rolling your own activity designer. I've found numerous uses for this including inserting additional activities when a parent composite activity is added to the design surface and setting default property values at design time. When I have an activity whose properties are usually bound to the same value (often a property on my base workflow), I find it useful to extend the designer to create this bindings automatically...

Sometimes too many options is a bad thing. After all just because I create a property in my custom activity doesn't mean I want it displayed on the design surface. To Microsoft's credit, most of the design behavior of workflow is customizable and often pluggable, making it possible and practical to extend the user experience. Microsoft provides a Browseable attribute which can be placed on properties that according to the help file : specifies whether a property or event should be displayed in a...

XAML only workflows (those are xoml files without a code attribute and code beside file), do not support debugger breakpoints. Right clicking on the activity in the workflow and selecting insert breakpoint does (as far as I can tell) nothing. Since XAML only workflows have no associated code and therefore no IL, it makes sense that you can't set a breakpoint, after all what exactly are you attaching the breakpoint to? XAML only workflows are all about process orchestration and flow control, we really...

After installing VS2008, I quickly noticed the absence of some of my favorite IDE helpers. How do I copy project references between projects? How do I locate the current document in the solution explorer, without turning on that annoying "track active" option No problem.. I'll just reinstall CoolCommands, or as I like to call it "Commands That Microsoft Should Have included, but didn't" For the uninitiated, learn about coolcommands here -->http://weblogs.asp.ne...

Recently I migrated one of my solutions from .net 3.0 to .net 3.5. For the most part the migration went smoothly, except for an issue with the type provider, and XAML activated workflows that included accompanying .rules files. I was able to load and work with the workflows in the Visual Studio designer, but they would fail execution at runtime: line 402 error 1342: Activity 'PersistWasSucessful' validation failed: Can not find the condition "ParticipationSaved". ---> System.Workflow.ComponentMo...