Steve Danielson has published a great tutorial for ramping up on Workflow Manager 1.0. Workflow Manager 1.0 was initially built for hosting workflows easily in SharePoint, however it can also be used for scaling out multi-tenant solutions using WF.

The past two weeks I have been touring Florida speaking on WF4.5. Last week I spoke in Tallahassee, Florida to Capital City .NET User Group and literally just finished speaking at Orlando's Code Camp. Both presentations were packed and it was good to see that WF is becoming more popular. While speaking in Tally, I was able to speak longer to the user group, but today I was rushed since the sessions are scheduled back to back. If you attended my session today, you would have witnessed that my last demo on "dynamic update" failed. This was partially because I was rushed, but what actually caused the failure? Well just before I started on this post I was able to research my issue. My scenario revolved around the state-machine workflow below...

I had done everything I needed to do for updating the workflow so that when a customer returned a movie they rented, a list of latest movies would be presented as a way for them to rent another movie, rather then just walking away. The problem was that I never unloaded the workflow from the initial rental before making the updates to the workflow. So what I did was simply recall the persisted workflow instance that had been rented and unloaded it formally. The ReturnMovie bookmark was then set, which allowed the renter to see a list of movies where originally just a message was presented to the customer thanking them for the rental.

If you want to see more about the presentation, please check out my book titled, Pro WF4.5 and the code that is provided with the book!

The team at Microsoft who is responsible for managing WF has plugged my book in a recent blog post... Thank you Workflow Team!

The other day I found this image of a Windows Phone that can bend, much like a piece of plastic. You can learn more about the technology here

I am almost finished with my book, "Pro WF4.5" for Apress. Right now I am finishing up on my current chapter, "Versioning Workflows", and I noticed that a fellow Microsoft MVP, Maurice has blogged about how versioning is done. If you have not clicked on his link already here is a little background. Workflows can now be versioned using WorkflowIdentity. By specifying a version, name and package information (metadata about the version of the workflow), this information can be persisted within a persistence store so it can be queried later. Versioning workflows allows them to be run either side-by-side, which means that a new version of a workflow can execute new workflow instances, and executing persisted workflow instances that were executed using an older workflow definition version. A workflow definition can also execute workflow instances and while the instances are persisted, the workflow definition can be dynamically updated so that persisted instances from the older version of a workflow definition can be updated to run within the new version. 

Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate has been released and can be downloaded here.

Below are two bullet points on the Jquery site for validation. They describe the behavior for the JQuery validation plugin, around Lazy and Eagerly validation for user input on a web page.

• Before a field is marked as invalid, the validation is lazy: Before submitting the form for the first time, the user can tab through fields without getting annoying messages - he won't get bugged before he had the chance to actually enter a correct value

• Once a field was marked invalid, it is eagerly validated: As soon as the user entered the necessary value, the error message is remove

Based on how the HTML is rendered, this behavior may not be observed. For instance, after calling validate() for a form, eargerly validation(validation on events like Mouseup/down and keyPressUp/down.) does not occur after corrections are made to validated input. To make sure that you get eagerly validation when using straight HTML markup for textboxes, make sure to add the input TYPE and NAME as illustrated below for the html elements. For example, the markup below illustrates the class, 'required number' so the textbox will first be validated to make sure a value is supplied and then it will check if the value is numeric after validating the form submission and then after changes as new data is entered.