I recently was helping someone out who was having trouble with setting correlation for workflow instances. He wanted to pass in an entity as a property to a service call correlating with other service calls. This can simply be done by setting up the correlation based on a unique value of the property. For instance, if  Candidate.CandidateId is unique and you need to pass in the entire Candidate object, you can set the "CorrelatesOn" property, "Query" to just the CandidateId of the object being passed in.  You will also see a "Key" property within the "CorrelatesOn", this property needs to match the other correlated set "Key" properties.

Last month Microsoft released the .Net Framework 4 Platform Update 1 - Runtime Update which focuses on WF4 updates, but first you will also need Visual Studio 2010, SP1  One of the features that WF developers have been asking for is the State Machine style of workflow. When Windows Workflow Foundation first shipped, it allowed developers to build sequential workflows and state machine workflows. When Windows Workflow 4.0 was released it introduced the flowchart style of workflow. Now the flowchart style of workflow allows the flexibility that was some what limited in WF3.x. Using a flowchart style workflow you can model and build state machine workflows, however because the state machine workflow style was offered in WF3.x, developers still want to utilize the rich features that building state machine workflows offer.

If you have worked with state machine workflows in the past you will notice a dramatic difference. Below is an example of a state machine workflow in WF3.x

 

and here you can see a much richer state machine workflow experience in WF4.0

 

 

I will add some additional posts on showing how to build state machine workflows in WF4.0.

Today I will embark on a journey that will keep me in the same State, but take me to a place that is all but familiair to me...South Florida! Why do I say this? No sweet tea! There is something wrong with being in Florida and not being able to purchase sweet tea. However, I am looking forward to presenting on a couple of things that are dear to my heart. My sessions will focus on hosting workflows in Windows App Fabric and architecting solution with Visual Studio 2010. If you get a chance come check out my sessions and a wealth of other sessions. This is Florida's biggest codecamp I believe and some of the best speakers around present at it, so you are bound to learn something just by showing up and saying, "hi". Find out more at http://www.fladotnet.com/codecamp/

Looks like I was chosen to present at South Florida's CodeCamp! February 12, 2011 I will be heading down to talk about WF and Windows Server AppFab. Register here and come see my talk!

Just finished my session on hosting workflows using WF4 in Windows Server AppFabric! I actually thought that I might not have enough demos for the session time, however my work paid off last week and I made more than I could show. First I showed how to build a custom workflow host with persistence. I demonstrated that I could shut down the host and pick back up where the workflow left off. Then I moved to building a workflow exposed as WCF. I showed how this was using raw ADO.Net but also showed how Entity Framework 4.0 could be used as well. Finally I pushed the workflow service into AppFabric and connected a client to it. On purpose I added more characters than the database field could hold so that the call would fail. I did this because I was able to work with the monitoring senarios with AppFabric when I got the same error by mistake:(. This was a nice turn into how AppFabric worked and how monitoring could be used to detect the errors that the client app could not see.

You might not see this error until you start deploying workflow services to Windows Server AppFabric and configuring persistence or host management!

 

 All it means is that you need to add "net.pipe to the list of protocols the applicaiton can use. To do this

1. Click on the deployed Application
2. Click "Advanced Settings..."
3. Look for "Enabled Protocols" which probably has "http" already added
4. Add ",net.pipe" like below

Ahhh...Heading back to Tallahassee, Fl. tonight to speak in the town of my Alma mater, FSU! Not too excited about the game last Saturday with Oklahoma, however I do like spending time there.  Tonight at the Captial City Arch SIG, I will be presenting on AppFabric Caching, its benefits and how to integrate it into existing solutions.

Tonight is our monthly meeting and all week I have been building Hyper-V machines to serve as the cluster I will be using for my demos. My company, FlowFocus Solutions (http://www.flowfocus.com) will be hosting the meeting with food afterwards at Longhorn. Hope to see ya!

Windows Server AppFabric was released yesterday...Get it here!

Just confirmed that I will be heading to Tally in June to share about the exciting new features in WF. Lately I have been speaking at Florida codecamps so I am looking forward to getting more personal with usergroups too with presentations on WF.