Winterdom

If you're creating a custom composite activity, you might need to restrict whether a given activity can be inserted as a child at a specific point of your composite activity when working on the Workflow Designer. Fortunately, this is actually fairly easy using the designer facilities in Windows Workflow Foundation....

Roger Wolter talks a bit about the architecting solutions that use the new Service Broker features in SQL Server 2005. Pretty interesting, and hopefully the start of a good series of articles on the topic.

Remember all those posts about good exception handling practices? Well, it seems even the best of us can fall into that trap. I've been working on putting the finishing touches on a socket server for one of our clients, and I've happy as to the results I've had so far...

While doing some work a couple of days ago I went though the installation of the Vista RC1 build on my older laptop, a Compaq Presario 2800 (yes, an old beast). Mostly it was click, click, wait a lot, so it didn't interrupt me at all. My installation experience was far better...

Here's another sample PowerShell script, this time to manage BizTalk Server ports and receive locations. This one can: List all send ports List all receive ports and their associated receive locations List all send port groups and what send ports are associated with each one Enable/Disable a receive location Start/Stop/Enlist/Unenlist a...

My friend Sam Gentile posted yesterday an excellent entry on what it means to be an Agile Architect. There's a bunch of good stuff in there and I plan on taking advantage on some of the good advice Sam brings forward: "Archtects code all the time and sit with the...

Jesus Rodriguez has posted a cool sample on how to take advantage of extensibiliy points in the InvokeWebService activity in Windows Workflow Foundation so that it can call a WSE3-enabled Web Service. Pretty cool!

I've been lately working on implementing the "server" side of a TCP-based communications protocol for one of our clients that struck me a bit odd. The protocol itself is fairly simple, so that's not an issue; it's the messaging pattern that I found somewhat strange given the context under which...

As it happens once a year, every year, today happens to be my birthday. Elevator stops on the 29th floor. Yay to me!

Just had a chance to read Keith Brown's article on "Security on Windows Communication Foundation" on last month's copy of MSDN Magazine. Good stuff to keep in mind.