One of the coolest operation features that any WF developer will notice is the ability to drag new activities on to the designer canvas without worring how it will fit. Before, if I had a custom activity that did not have a container for holding other activities, you would have to "cut" the existing activity out in order to add it in.

Below demonstrates a simple Exception activity that needs a TryCatch activity.

I can simply add the TryCatch activity by doing nothing more then I should, by dragging it from the toolbox. As I bring the TryCatch activity and hover over the Exception activity two bars appear, one over the Exception activity and one below. The bars help guide the position for the new activity by indicating if you want the new activity placed above or below the existing activity. If I place it above, I get a new Sequence activity, which contains mew new TryCatch and the existing Exception activity.

Very cool feature WF Team, can't wait to show off more!

The biggest challenge I will face this year is writing my first book on WF4.5. I have always wanted to write a book because of my passion for Windows Workflow Foundation and helping others, however now that I have finished my first chapter I am learning that it is much easier speaking about WF than writing about it. Well I better get back to writing:)

I have the priviledge to speak at VSLive this year in Orlando. Here are the outlines for my two sessions...

T3 AppFabric, Workflow and WCF - The Next Generation Middleware

Imagine a future where you can write a composite (N-Tier) app and quickly deploy it to a server, public or private cloud.

Where the platform supports elastic scale, stateless and partitioned stateful services. In this session you will learn how you can take advantage of this powerful new platform.

You will learn:

• What AppFabric is and where it is going in the future
• How you can create services and workflows using this new platform
• How to publish, manage and monitor apps using AppFabric

T8 Building Applications with Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Azure

Windows Workflow Foundation shipped with .NET 4 and is a great way to build extensible apps, model long-running processes and orchestrate services. In this session, we’ll look at the options available to leverage Workflow Foundation in Windows Azure, starting with the capabilities on offer today, before taking a peek into the future and looking at some new features that the team is working on for running and managing workflows in Azure.

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!

Wow...it is great to be back from vacation...does that even make since? My first long vacation in a year. So what about TechEd? It is sad to say that my first TechEd experience was last year in New Orleans. Talk about blown away! I never want to miss another...In fact, I just submitted a couple lf sessions on WF to see if I could have the honor of presenting next year.

Just submitted 5 sessions that hit just about every angle of WF4 so hopefully they will add me in the lineup for speaking at DevConnection next year. I have spoken at the conference before however I was a co-speaker.

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.