July 2006 - Mike Taulty's Blog

One of the interesting things about Workflow Foundation is the dazzling array of services that you can plug into it in order to alter/extend the base functionality. I’ve just been playing very slightly with plugging in a WorkflowLoaderService which takes responsibility for loading workflows into the runtime and so I thought I’d share the very basic stuff that I’ve been playing with. When you come to the WorkflowRuntime and ask it to create a Workflow for you, you have two choices (note – this is pseudo code which I haven’t compiled); Type myWorkflowType = typeof(SomeWorkflowClass); XmlReader myXmlReader = new XmlTextReader(“c:\\somefile.xml”); WorkflowRuntime runtime = new WorkflowRuntime(); // Choice 1 runtime.CreateWorkflow( myXmlReader ); // Choice 2 runtime.CreateWorkflow( myWorkflowType ); so you can get a WorkflowInstance created either by passing in an XML definition of the Workflow or by passing in a type. The runtime handles these two instances itself but if you add an instance of a WorkflowLoaderService...

Gareth 's team is currently looking for developers to join them in working on aspects of Visual Studio such as the Domain Specific Language tools and the Guidance Automation Toolkit . There aren't many opportunities to do development work for Microsoft in the UK and even fewer that would give you a chance to contribute to Visual Studio itself so if this is of interest to you then check out the UK Jobs page for the full description . Good luck with it if it's of interest to you and you decide to take it forward :-)

Quick update on this post - Ian kindly gave me a nudge and said that running of .NET code inside of the shell might not be supported in that the shell loading COM components implemented in .NET might cause some versioning problems. I'll see if I can find an official answer to that and post it here but, in the meantime, apply a reasonably large dose of salt to the post. One of the nice features of the Vista shell is its ability to display different sizes of thumbnails based on the actual contents of a document. So, when I'm looking through a folder of 100's of PowerPoints or Spreadsheets I can actually see what it is I'm looking at in the shell rather than having to open all the documents. You can plug into this for your own document types by writing an implementation of the interface IThumbnailProvider and returning a bitmap back to the shell for it to use. I was talking to Andy yesterday and he was mentioning that this interface is an unmanaged COM interface rather than a managed one so I thought I'd have a bash...

Maybe it's the heat but my Toshiba M3 laptop is driving me nuts with amount of noise it generates. So, here's my top tip. I saw a colleague do this recently and then forgot all about it but it certainly worked for me today with my M3 (which has a worryingly small ventilation slot on it). If you've had your M3 for a while and the fan is making a racket then pick it up, purse your lips and give the ventilation slot a few really good blows to try and get the dust out of it. It might be best doing this with the machine switched off and also watch out for the dust coming back at you :-) Naturally, if you've got a little hoover that you can suck the dust out with, that might be a better plan than blowing it further into the PC. It certainly worked for me today in shutting the fan up a bit. Hopefully it'll last for a few weeks before having to do it again.

There's a (relatively) new kind of software interface in town and it's the automated Messenger Robot. The first example that I saw was the Microsoft Encarta robot that you can add to your friends in Messenger (useful when, like me, your friend list is a little short) and he talks to you and answers questions as in; Mike Taulty says: Morning Encarta® Instant Answers says: Hi again, Mike Taulty! I can now answer your questions using any of the following Encarta sites: 1 Encarta Australia 2 Encarta Canada (English) 3 Encarta UK 4 Encarta US Just pick one and we'll be on our way! Mike Taulty says: Can you speak German? Encarta® Instant Answers says: Ich spreche leider kaum Deutsch...Sie können sich aber mit meinem deutschen Kollegen "Encarta IM Antworten" unterhalten. Der Kontakt für MSN Messenger lautet: de.encarta@botmetro.net Mike Taulty says: What about Italian? Encarta® Instant Answers says: Let me take you to our Language Homework Help section => Encarta® Instant Answers is inviting you to start Encarta....

The list of the screen captures (we call them "MSDN Nuggets" in the UK) that I made around Windows Workflow Foundation has grown a little today in that we've published a bunch more material to the UK MSDN site. There's now around 15 or so videos on Workflow Foundation (plus a bunch more on other topics!) so I thought I'd list them all out here. It's worth saying that around the first half of these are significantly older than the second half and were made on different versions of the technology but the general idea of the topics involved should be ok as Workflow has been great in not changing radically from CTP to CTP. It's also worth saying that I've learnt things about Workflow as I've gone along so if you spot glaring errors then let me know. Here's the list and the suggested running order; 01 Workflow Foundation Hello World Watch Download 02 Dealing with Exceptions Watch Download 03 Conditional Logic Watch Download 04 The Conditioned Activity Group Watch Download 05 Working in Parallel Watch Download 06 Dealing...

According to the item up here http://www.netfx3.com/blogs/news_and_announcements/archive/2006/07/17/4488.aspx there’s a new July CTP of .NET Framework 3.0 that came out yesterday/today. I’m just back from holiday and I’m in a bit of a mess with my .NET Framework 3.0. I’ve got Windows XP running Beta 2 where CardSpaces doesn’t work properly :-( but I do have Interactive Designer and all the other bits I need. I’ve also got Windows Vista running build 5456 which (I think) means it has the June CTP of .NET Framework 3.0 but on that build I don’t really have a proper Interactive Designer that I can show to people. It looks like there’s another Vista build coming (5472) that has the July CTP of .NET Framework 3.0 already on it but then it’s not clear how that sync’s up with Expression and the other tooling bits. The only Vista bits I see on MSDN are still the Beta 2 bits so it looks like the 5472 build might not be made generally available. As an aside, upgrading...