.NET Reflector, by Lutz Roeder, must be one of the most useful tools I have when developing .NET code. Usually it is the first thing I install right after Visual Studio not even waiting until I need it because I know I will. So the big news is that Red Gate, makers of the Ants profiler and lots of other tools, are taking over from Lutz Roeder and will continue developing .NET Reflector. Interesting move and I hope this means a bright future for the .NET Reflector. Read more about this here . Enjoy!

Windows Workflow Foundation, WF for short, is one of the technologies I work a lot with and as a consequence I own several books about WF. Comparing this book with the others I can only say it is one of the best books you can get on the subject. It has a good coverage of almost all the subject you are going to need to know. Not only is there a good coverage but the explanation and examples are very clear. Now there are a few thing missing from the book. As it was written with the .NET framework 3.0

It is available from the subscriptions download at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/default.aspx Get it while it is hot Enjoy!

In a previous blog post I write about what happens when you place a TransactionScopeActivity within a ReceiveActivity and an exception occurs that is supposed to roll back the transaction. In short the story was very bad and we could come up with only a partial workaround, not a pretty sight. But there is more to it than just that little horror story. Suppose you do the obvious and place the a TransactionScopeActivity within a ReceiveActivity and no exception occurs. Say like the workflow below,

I got an email from a friend last week asking about using a ReceiveActivity and, while receiving, using a TransactionScopeActivity to transitionally save some data in a database. Seems like a common enough scenario right? Well he was having some problems. If everything worked and the transaction succeeded everything was fine and the answer came back. But if an exception occurred and the transaction was aborted be was receiving a real weird error: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[System.ServiceModel.ExceptionDetail]:

Afgelopen jaar hebben we het eerste CodeCamp in Nederland georganiseerd en dat was een groot succes. De meeste deelnemers vroegen om meer, sommige zelfs om een CodeCamp per kwartaal of een heel weekend lang. Nou hebben we dat laatste nog niet gedaan maar we zijn wel aan de slag gegaan om een nieuw CodeCamp te organiseren. Als datum hebben we zaterdag 6 september gekozen. Gelukkig waren Microsoft en Class-a behulpzaam en kunnen we, net als vorig jaar, weer in het Microsoft Innovation Center in Barneveld

SQL Compact is a great little database and highly recommended. However it was designed for use on small compact, hence its name, devices and that has some drawbacks. One of these is that it doesn't run as a 64 bits application. And by default if you create a .NET application it is compile as "Any CPU" meaning it will run as a 64 bits application on a 64 bits version of Windows. I, or I should say Ron Jacobs , ran into that using my SqlCeWorkflowPersistenceService because the sample/test

I have just updated the SQL Server Compact Workflow Persistence Service to better handle deserialization issues when loading a workflow. The service now makes sure the WorkflowRuntime ServicesExceptionNotHandled is raised, something it should have done in the first place. You can download the SQL Server Compact Workflow Persistence Service from here . Enjoy! www.TheProblemSolver.nl http://wiki.WindowsWorkflowFoundation.eu

In a previous blog post I demonstrated how TypeMock allowed us to mock out the workflow runtime infrastructure and create true unit tests for a workflow activity. Now this may not seems like a big deal but because most of the classes in the workflow runtime are sealed mocking them with another mocking framework is pretty much impossible. Now you can test custom activities by wrapping them in a test workflow, creating a workflow runtime, running the workflow and inspecting the result I can hardly

When working with state machine workflow's the SetStateActivity is one of the more important activities to use. The main reason is that is the one used to transition from one state to another. You can actually transition state in a different way as well using the StateMachineWorkflowInstance.SetState() function but the SetStateActivity is by far the most often used. One of the cool features of the SetStateActivity that may not be immediately obvious is the fact that it doesn't do the state