Yesterday I had a great time presenting an introduction on WPF to DEEWR developers and managers.

Here is the agenda from the presentation: 

• WPF Features
• WPF Applications
• Display Technologies
• WPF Rendering Tiers
• XAML & XAML Uses
• Class Hierarchy
• The Application Class
• Layout & Layout Panels
• Content Model
• Dependency Properties
• Property Coercion
• Routed Events
• Pages and Navigation
• Page Functions
• Commands
• Styles
• Control Templates
• Data Binding

 

Download WPFIntroduction.pptx (206.42 kb)

 

 

The latest version of Clog has been released. This version provides support for Silverlight 2 Beta 1.

 Some remaining work items:

• Enhance the Log viewer as more data can be displayed for log entries.
• Create further unit tests for asynchronous scenarios.

 

Like me, you may have read in various books and articles that there exists a restriction of one WorkflowRuntime instance for each App Domain. This is, in fact, not true. In an early beta release of WF such a restriction existed, and this fact has been perpetuated even though the restriction has long since been removed.

The following code sample is a simple demonstration to show that there is no problem creating multiple WorkflowRuntime instances. 

The Workflow1 class contains a code activity that writes a message to console and a delay activity that pauses for five seconds.

 

And the result:

 

 

Download the sample code: MultiRuntime.zip (27.55 kb)

 

 

Thanks go out to my learned colleague, Jeff Brokenshire, who brought it to my attention and pointed me to this blog post.

 

Today I gave the first in a series of presentations on Workflow Foundation (at DEEWR).

Agenda from the presentation:

•  
  • WF Overview
  • Activities
  • Services
  • Sequential Workflows
  • Rules
  • State Machine Workflows
  • Persistence
  • Workflow Tracking

The slides and demo code can be downloaded here (1,015.05 kb)
 

Andrew Coates from Microsoft was kind enough to provide me with trial software handouts for the event. Thanks Andrew.

 

I'm pleased to report that Legion has taken out the Best C# Article award for December 2007. Hurray!

Today’s release of my latest article, URL Object Serialization: An effortless approach to user account confirmation, marks a break from my usual WPF/Silverlight slant. For some time I have been meaning to write up my experiences with creating a fire and forget user account confirmation system. The nice thing about this approach is that very little housekeeping needs to take place, as workflow information can be encapsulated in an object instance, sent to the client, and then reinstated later.  

Today CodeProject announced the final results for the Visual Studio 2008 Competition, their “biggest competition yet.” I snuck it in with Legion, and then Sacha Barber for Silverlight 1.1 Fun and Games. This one was way to close to call and, incase you haven’t already done so, I highly recommend taking a look at Sacha’s article; it’s superb and could have quite easily won it. Kudos to you Sacha.

Some Clog users have asked me to set up Clog as a ‘proper’ open source project. I am pleased to announce that the Clog project is now hosted on CodePlex.

A few days ago I received notification that I have been awarded The Code Project’s MVP credential. There are millions of CodeProject users, and only 40 MVPs, which makes it quite an honour. You can now find me in the Hall of Fame. 

The Clog: Client Logging, WPF Edition aritlce has been updated to include some modifications I made during the development of the Legion article.

• Added a config attribute to disable the use of ASP.NET Membership by Clog.
• Integrated Silverlight and WPF Editions into the same download.

The Silverlight Edition contains the bulk of the changes. I have enhanced the multithreaded logging capability to prevent exceptions due to logging calls being made from non STA threads.