Preventing an Activity from being a Child of Itself

Someone asked an interesting question on the Windows Workflow Foundation forums regarding how to prevent a custom composite activity from being a direct/indirect child of itself, similar to how the TransactionScopeActivity does. However, he wanted to be able to control this in the WF designer, and not just using a custom...

Microsoft's Symbol Server

Scott Hanselman posted here on how to enable support for Microsoft's Symbol Server to get the operating system's symbol files as they are needed. Let me say that the symbols server rocks. It's an incredibily useful feature you ought yourself to check out seriously. One of the really cool things...

Strange COM+/SC Problem with Threads

I've been spending most of today diagnosing a fairly strange issue that has been nagging one of our services in production, and which we hadn't yet been able to fully repro until today. The basic application itself is fairly simple: It's an ASP.NET v1.1 Web Service that calls into a...

Dell Bateries

Around December last year I bought a new Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop. Overall, I've been happy with the machine, though it is a bit on the heavy side, and I really can't complain much about it. A few weeks ago I read the news about the huge Sony battery recall by...

IParameterInspector and OneWay Operations

I talked before about the IParameterInspector extension interface in Windows Communication Foundation. One topic I didn't cover was the behavior of IParameterInspector in relation to one way operations in WCF services. I'm refering here to operations explicitly marked with [OperationContract(IsOneWay=true)]. With OneWay operations, the behavior of IParameterInspector is different in...

Casting, Operators and ToString()

Over the years working with C#, I've seen a little bit of everything. One of my pet peeves are a set of issues I've seen way too many times involving incorrect use of casts, the is/as operators and the ToString() methods. Most of the times these things are misused in C#...

Technorati Tags And dasBlog Categories in v1.9

I noticed today that my Technorati profile page had the list of Top tags I blogged about all screwed up, with the name of the dasBlog category page as the tag name instead of just the category name. I am guessing this was caused after the upgrade to dasBlog 1.9,...

IParameterInspector in WCF

I mentioned earlier on that I was really enjoying playing with the extensibility hooks in Windows Communication Foundation. One of the hooks I've been playing with lately is Parameter Inspectors. A lot of the extension interfaces in windows Communication Foundation are designed to be used both from the client side as...

Listing BTS Adapters with Powershell

This sample script will list all installed adapters in your local BizTalk Server, including the names of configured send and receive handlers for them: #<br /> # Helper function to list all WMI objects of<br /> # a given type<br /> #<br /> function bts-list-objs($kind)<br /> {<br />    get-wmiobject $kind `<br />...

WCF Extensibility

I've been playing with Windows Communication Foundation for a while now, and one of the really strong points of WCF is it's extensibility story. While certainly not perfect, there are a lot of points where you can hook into the processing pipeline and introduce custom code into almost all aspects of the...