Architect or Cobbler?: June 2006

Well, Developer Day has come and gone, and it was a very good day, with some interesting talks. As usual, some of the talks I really wanted to see clashed with my presentation. My talk on Workflow suffered form the usual timeflow management problems I seem to suffer from, so I didn't manage to finish everything, so didn't demo some of the really cool features. The presentation and demos are available here, obviously you need to install WF beta 2 if you wantto run them.

One thing I didn't get to demonstrate is the workflow debugger, which allows you to put breakpoints in the visual editor and then break into the workflow. It's simplicity itself, however it doesn't work if your workflow is in a workflow library, as debugging the workflow host doesn't trigger the "Ah, you're a workflow, so I'll load the workflow debugger" moment for VS20005. To fix it simply set the workflow library as the startup project, open up the project properties and navigate to the Debug pane. Make sure you select your workflow host application as the external process to start up (unless you're hosting the workflow in an ASP.Net application, then you should specify the URL of the starting page)

Now you can set breakpoints in the designer, and they will be hit during debug. You can move through the workflow using F10 and F11 as normal, and you can still set breakpoints in the code. The call stack window shows activities rather than call stacks (unless it breaks in code)

Go ahead, give it a try.

# posted by James @ 1:37 PM 4 comments

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Sunday, June 04, 2006


Architect or Cobbler? Good code starts with good design
about me Name: James Winters Home: Swindon links Solid Quality Mentors The Server Side - .NET edition The Server Side - J2EE edition The .NET Architecture Centre Java BluePrints Blogs I follow Darren Burford - Darren's Journal Julie Lerman - Don't be Iffy Danny Simmons - system.data.objects. dev guy recent posts The end of an era Hubris ... DDD6 - One down, one to go Contrary to popular belief ... DataContracts and VB - A warning Merry Christmas ... How to use BackgroundWorker properly ;-) BackgroundWorker race condition bug? Coming up for air Scribble is Done archives May 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 May 2006 June 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 November 2007 March 2008 feeds	Developer Day Review Sunday, June 04, 2006 Well, Developer Day has come and gone, and it was a very good day, with some interesting talks. As usual, some of the talks I really wanted to see clashed with my presentation. My talk on Workflow suffered form the usual timeflow management problems I seem to suffer from, so I didn't manage to finish everything, so didn't demo some of the really cool features. The presentation and demos are available here, obviously you need to install WF beta 2 if you wantto run them. One thing I didn't get to demonstrate is the workflow debugger, which allows you to put breakpoints in the visual editor and then break into the workflow. It's simplicity itself, however it doesn't work if your workflow is in a workflow library, as debugging the workflow host doesn't trigger the "Ah, you're a workflow, so I'll load the workflow debugger" moment for VS20005. To fix it simply set the workflow library as the startup project, open up the project properties and navigate to the Debug pane. Make sure you select your workflow host application as the external process to start up (unless you're hosting the workflow in an ASP.Net application, then you should specify the URL of the starting page) Now you can set breakpoints in the designer, and they will be hit during debug. You can move through the workflow using F10 and F11 as normal, and you can still set breakpoints in the code. The call stack window shows activities rather than call stacks (unless it breaks in code) Go ahead, give it a try. # posted by James @ 1:37 PM 4 comments