75+ Aggregated BizTalk Blogs

I just noticed today that Stephen W. Thomas has created a place on his excellent BizTalkGurus.com site that aggregates more than 75 BizTalk-related blogs. Pretty cool, and a nice addition to the BizTalkGurus site which is already one of the best BizTalk resources on the net with all of Stephen's...

Object Initializers in C# 3.0

One of the new language features in C# 3.0, thanks to the LINQ stuff, is the new syntax for object and collection initializers. Basically, this feature allows you to initialize an object by both creating the object instance (i.e. a new expression) as well as assign values to one or...

More Candidates for Community Contribution

About a month ago I posted an offer to the community for a contribution to a community leader of an MVP invite card for a one-year MSDN subscription. I haven't had much interest in this yet, which is why I haven't announced the lucky winner yet. Come on people! If...

WF Designer caching invalid XOML?

While <FONT color=#52b3cb>updating</FONT> my <FONT color=#d99694>MSMQ Activities</FONT> for Windows Workflow Foundation, I ran into a strange issue with the WF designer when working with XOML-based workflows. The problem I was trying to solve was something like the following: The MsmqReceiveActivity had an attached dependency property called Label, as well as a...

VS.NET 2003 vs. VS 2005

I've been doing some work lately on Visual Studio .NET 2003, after a long while of working with Visual Studio 2005. I've been really missing the .NET 2.0 features like generics and the like, but what really knocked me out was the speed. I use to think that VS.NET 2003...

Automatic locale detection on Web applications

Many web sites around will use techniques to try to discover automatically a user's preffered locale when he accesses the site for the first site, in order to provide the user with content in his native language, for example. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but I don't personally like...

A Custom UITypeEditor for Activity Properties

As with many other technologies, the design time experience in Windows Workflow Foundation uses many of the same extensibility mechanisms found in other designers (such as the Windows Forms designer). One of those is the hability to provide custom type editors for properties by creating an UITypeEditor-derived class and then...

Updated MsmqActivities now on Activity Library

With a little help from Matthew Winkler, I now have added my recently updated MSMQ Activities for Windows Workflow Foundation posted on the Activity Library over at the WF community site. Thanks!

$100 to spend on WF

Matt Winkler asks here on feedback as to what we'd like to see on Windows Workflow Foundation that might help reduce the complexity and/or improve the WF experience for developer: spend a $100 bucks on what you'd like to see. Here's my take on it: $10: Out of the Box...

Workflow Complexity, Part 2

Jon Flanders weights in on the complexity of Windows Workflow Foundation, saying he disagrees with some of the points raised by Brian and Scott. I think he exaggerates a little bit when he says we think it is too complex, I just said it was complex :-). While Jon raises...