HOWTO: Disable CRL Checking for Certificates in BizTalk

When using the MIME/SMIME Decoder Pipeline Component in BizTalk Server 2004 and 2006, you might get an error at runtime saying that "The revocation status of the certificate used to sign the message is unknown" or something to that effect. The cause of this error is that BizTalk is trying...

Using WS-Security: Not as easy as it seems

WS-Security 1.0 has been around since the start of 2004 as a formal Oasis spec, so one could hope that now, two years later, using this stuff was much easier. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be so.There are many fine toolkits now that implement support for WS-Security in several different...

Schemas embedded as resources

Scott comments here on a utility XmlUrlResolver he wrote to load schemas embedded as resources in .NET assemblies that contain includes between them. This is a powerful feature, and it's nice to see how the XML stack was open to extension in ways like this.FWIW, I did something like this...

Simple WF designer customizations

You can do a lot of customizations on how the Windows Workflow Foundation designer will present your custom activities to the user with relatively minor work. For example, you can change the default text that gets shown on the activity (instead of the default which is the activity name), change...

WSE3 and C++/CLI

C++/CLI and WSE3WSE3 brings some very welcomed upgrades to WSE, including MTOM and WS-Security 1.1 support to the .NET Framework v2.0. For those of you interested in this, you might want to know that most of WSE3 (at least all the features I've personally tried) works just fine with C++/CLI,...

WF Event Activities (2)

In a previous post I introduced event activities in Windows Workflow Foundation and what were the basics of how to create one. Now that we know which interfaces we need to implement, let's see now how to actually implement one.   </p> In a regular activity, the basic lifetime is...

A Vista, finally!

I'm happy to report that I finally had luck installing Vista build 5308 on my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop. Installation was very quick, being done in less than an hour, and was succesful at the first try. This is definitely a big, big improvement over previous builds for me and...

Editors, Fonts and Boldness

I've never been a fan of using mixed bold and normal fonts in development editors. Mostly because I had fairly ugly experiences with editor configurations that used bold fonts for things like keywords: it usually ended up that things didn't align properly, or, worse, the caret position didn't reflect where...

MSMQ Workflow Activities, V1

I've just uploaded a set of sample Windows Workflow Foundation activities for Microsoft Message Queue in the Winterdom.Workflow.Activities.Msmq assembly. The MsmqSendActivity allows you to send a .NET object as an MSMQ message by just binding the activity to one of your workflow's properties and selecting the appropriate formatter (XmlMessageFormatter or...

WF Event Activities (1)

I've been spending some time digging into Windows Workflow Foundation, in particular looking at how to implement good (and complex) custom activities. One of the topics I've found more interesting is implementing Event Activities, which are those that can be used as the first child activity in an EventDrivenActivity (either...