kennyw.com » Workflow

Setting up SQL Persistence for WF4 Beta 1

Kenny — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:57:30 +0000

A few customers have hit a speed bump when trying to setup persistence with WF4 Beta1. We have multiple sql scripts included (for 3.5 persistence and 4.0 persistence). The problem is that depending on your WF application model in Beta1 you have to execute different scripts (we’ve fixed this in Beta2).

For WorkflowServiceHost usage, use these SQL scripts:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.20408\SQL\en\SqlPersistenceProviderSchema40.sql
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.20408\SQL\en\SqlPersistenceProviderLogic40.sql

For WorkflowInstance usage, use these SQL scripts (note the lack of “40”):

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.20408\SQL\en\SqlPersistenceProviderSchema.sql
C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.20408\SQL\en\SqlPersistenceProviderLogic.sql

Also make sure that the connection string in your application matches the database you created.

WF4 Activity Palette

Kenny — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:44:00 +0000

One of the investments we’ve made in WF4 is to increase the number of activities provided by the system. Leon has a nice overview of the activities included in Beta 1 here.

Ramping back up on the technical blog posts

Kenny — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:41:00 +0000

I’ve been pretty quiet recently on the technical blog front, mostly because my work was in the dark depths of development. A few weeks ago, we released Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2010 which includes all of the technologies I’ve been working on for the past 3 years

One of the big components included in .Net 4.0 Beta1 is the WF4 framework that I unveiled at PDC. The team is blogging here, and I’ll be including ongoing tidbits for WF and WCF to help smooth out speed bumps encountered by our customers.

Writing custom languages

Kenny — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:16:02 +0000

I’m sitting in one of the coolest talks at PDC. ChrisAn & GioDL are showing how you can use the nascent "Oslo" language technologies to write your own textual language. MGrammar has been described as yacc on crack.

You should check it out (probably starting tomorrow) at: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL31/

UPDATE: You can download the SDK here and start playing with writing your own custom language. Fun stuff!

Slides for WF 4.0: A First Look

Kenny — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:41:31 +0000

Slides should be available soon on Channel9. Until then, I’ve made them available here.

WF 4.0: A First Look

Kenny — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:48:22 +0000

On Monday afternoon I unveiled WF 4.0 at PDC 2008. With this public disclosure you will start seeing a lot more details of the WF system here.

For those of you that were able to attend my session in person, please fill out the evaluation form (we’re currently at about 5% participation).

For those that couldn’t join me in person, the session was videotaped and is available at http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL17/. Enjoy!

WCF talks at PDC

Kenny — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:56:51 +0000

Matt posted a great description of the WCF (and WF) talks we’re giving at PDC.

In particular there are two sessions that I’d like to call out.

The first is Ed Pinto’s session, where you’ll find out about the significant investments we’ve made to improve the WCF authoring experience:

WCF 4.0: Building WCF Services with WF in Microsoft .NET 4.0.

Eliminate the tradeoff between ease of service authoring and performant, scalable services. Hear about significant enhancements in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) 4.0 and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) 4.0 to deal with the ever increasing complexity of communication. Learn how to use WCF to correlate messages to service instances using transport, context, and application payloads. See how the new WF messaging activities enable the modeling of rich protocols. Learn how WCF provides a default host for workflows exposing features such as distributed compensation and discovery. See how service definition in XAML completes the union of WF and WCF with a unified authoring experience that simplifies configuration and is fully integrated with IIS activation and deployment.

Once you’ve built your services, you will need to deploy, host, and manage them. Windows Server "Dublin" handles this complexity, and Dan Eshner will unveil the details here:

Hosting Workflows and Services

Hear about extensions being made to Windows Server to provide a feature-rich middle-tier execution and deployment environment for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) applications. Learn about the architecture of this new extension, how it works, how to take advantage of it, and the features it provides that simplify deployment, management, and troubleshooting of workflows and services.

PDC 2008

Kenny — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 22:41:47 +0000

I’ve gone dark on the technical side of this blog for two main reasons:

Most of what I’m working on hasn’t been publicly disclosed
I’m prepping for PDC 2008 where I can finally discuss the past 2 years of my life without an NDA

If you want to see the latest and greatest Microsoft technologies that we’ve been cooking up, register now, and then mark your schedule for my talk:

Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0: A First Look

Programs coordinate work. The code for coordination and state management often obscures a program’s purpose. Learn how programming with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) 4.0 provides clarity of intent while preserving the functional richness of the .NET framework. See how easy it is to build workflows with the new Visual Studio workflow designer. Learn about text-based authoring options for WF. Hear how WF integrates well with other Microsoft technologies (WCF, WPF, ASP.NET). If you’ve looked at WF before, come and see the changes to data flow, composition, and new control flow styles. Significant improvements to usability, composability, and performance make Workflow a great fit for a broad range of solutions on both the client and the server.

Other great (and related) talks include Doug Purdy’s Lap Around Oslo, Matt’s Building WF Activities session, and Ed’s chocolate & peanut butter talk on WCF+WF.

41 days and counting…