The Activity Designer
Not actually a WF 4.0 blog any more :)
Grokking ContextAwareResult (.Net internals)
(This is the sequel to grokking LazyAsyncResult, which could be considered a prerequisite.) You'll...
Date: 10/17/2016
Grokking LazyAsyncResult (.Net internal)
(Background: sometimes as I try to understand our bugs, I have to learn about the .net internal...
Date: 10/17/2016
Slimming down your build - don't copy the intellisense files!
So you know how a lot of nuget packages include intellisense XML files and they get copied to your...
Date: 05/01/2015
Is Autofac magical - part II
Now that you've read part I perhaps you can answer this. What does this code do? class FO :...
Date: 04/06/2015
Is Autofac magical?
The answer is yes! OK let me explain. I never registered anything as...
Date: 04/03/2015
Distilling some ideas for keeping that data access code (and test code) tidy...
I just spent a while doing some refactoring. It turned out to be a very long while, probably much...
Date: 04/02/2015
Request and connection throttling when self hosting with OwinHttpListener
[Disclaimer before we begin: I'm not really an expert on OWIN (henceforth 'owin') or HttpListener -...
Date: 03/11/2015
Exploring F# (1)
C# and typescript are starting to feel too familiar and dull, so I went exploring. I fired up my...
Date: 02/17/2015
Everything but the language design…?
So I’ve been reading some history of programming languages. And one question that came up a lot is...
Date: 12/05/2014
Reading performance counter data in .NET
Nothing you can’t easily write yourself, but while playing around, I wrote this one myself, and...
Date: 11/21/2014
Tests should explain something
I sometimes see unit tests which are downright confusingly opaque. Being a unit test, they are...
Date: 09/19/2014
Is IQueryable poisoning your interfaces?
Thanks indirectly to a comment on my previous post, today I read ‘IQueryable is tight coupling’...
Date: 09/15/2014
Some code patterns I don't love in C#.
Pattern 1: TryGetFoo that returns boolean. MyEnum ret;if (Enum.TryParse<MyEnum>(normalized,...
Date: 08/29/2014
Azure Web Roles + RoleShared. Grrrrr…
I had a deployment to azure failing yesterday, and I thought ‘I know what caused this. It’s a dll...
Date: 08/28/2014
Azure SDK has trouble with worker roles whose names are different from the role’s project name – and how to fix it
I had seen this before, but today I became determined to figure out how to fix my targets file. The...
Date: 08/18/2014
The lexer hack
I found recently I like to do the coding more slowly and intersperse more reading than was once the...
Date: 08/11/2014
Scripting vs module systems...
A well known pain point of the CLR is that loading your program and running a few lines takes too...
Date: 08/11/2014
More tokenizing...
So I flippantly said 'write a helper function that captures the right pattern for tokenizing' last...
Date: 08/11/2014
In which I try to write a tokenizer, and fail...
I reread something by Steve Yegge, which I think was his NBL thing. Anyway, he said something to the...
Date: 08/02/2014
A Quick Reference to Azure Diagnostics
If you’ve used Azure much, you may have eventually decided to use the DiagnosticsAgent plugin, as I...
Date: 05/28/2014
The code pattern of doing everything in IQueryProvider…
(Rambling) I’m taking another short foray into IQueryable land. From my learnings last time, In...
Date: 03/05/2014
Is it a bug?: ClientWebSocket
The following program always fails for me with the web socket reaching the aborted state within a...
Date: 02/19/2014
How fast can your HTTP server go?
I have a burning question on my mind. How fast can an HTTP/HTTPS server go? When I say fast, I have...
Date: 02/17/2014
Unit Testing DbContexts and queries – the status quo
So here’s the scene. I’ve been working on unit testing for a solid day, my percent...
Date: 02/14/2014
Reflections on unit tests (and more what happened next) and introducing ashmind and his Argument NuGet package
Here are a few thoughts about the refactoring process from going through my initial unit testing...
Date: 02/13/2014
Struggling with unit tests (what happened next)
This is going to be a fairly uninteresting and hard to follow post, but its here for the record,...
Date: 02/12/2014
Struggling with unit tests (again)
I am having a mental hard time today because of unit tests. Not tests that fail... tests that don't...
Date: 02/12/2014
The worst Code Analysis Rule that’s ‘recommended’ - CA2202
CA2202: Do not dispose objects multiple times How I hate this rule! Firstly, the rule is predicated...
Date: 02/12/2014
How to view Azure Diagnostics Traces from WADLogsTable in your local console app
If you use Azure Diagnostics in your cloud service, and you use the DiagnosticTraceListener then all...
Date: 02/11/2014
A light-weight .Net ThreadPool Timer class
By letting the operating system to the heavy lifting! But first, what inspired this article? I was...
Date: 01/29/2014
Who knew… that pthreads Condition came to Windows?
Not me! Until I happened across the SleepConditionalVariableCS function doc. It seems like it’s been...
Date: 11/22/2013
If only you could set properties on fakes.
I'm using this library called FakeItEasy. The more I use it the more I like it. While using it I...
Date: 06/14/2013
Note to self - how to stop VS 2012 menus being all caps
reg ADD "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General" /v "SuppressUpperCaseConversion" /t...
Date: 05/21/2013
The mystery of the missing URL validation
Further to my adventures with unobtrusive validation of yesterday, I found myself very stuck while...
Date: 05/08/2013
Regular expressions are different in javascript! And Unintrusive Validation.
Today while trying to implement some new code, and cutting my teeth on javascript validation, I...
Date: 05/07/2013
The Entity Framework Leaking
'Fluent Interfaces' have been a bit of a buzz for probably long enough that I am not justified in...
Date: 04/02/2013
The joy of Change
Hey, it's been a long time since I updated this blog. Did anybody miss me? Didn't think so. Since...
Date: 02/05/2013
(WF4,VS) WorkflowDesigner Extensions in Visual Studio 2012
(Intro: Sometimes as part of testing I go to silly lengths to try to point out what I think is going...
Date: 10/04/2012
(WF4) Link - Using WF4 custom activities to consume OData
Today I’m just advertising another MSDN blog that got circulated my way. This post may only going to...
Date: 09/13/2012
(WF4) Survey–have you customized FlowDecision?
Today I was involved in a playful discussion about what would we do different about Workflow...
Date: 09/05/2012
(News) Workflow 1.0 Beta
Dropping the stealth cloak a little, it’s time for some personal news about what I’ve...
Date: 07/17/2012
(WF 4.5) Simplified activity designers with Activity Delegates (ActivityAction/ActivityFunc) in .Net 4.5
One of WF’s usability problems in the .Net 4.0 release was the complexity of creating custom...
Date: 06/05/2012
(WF4.5) Enabling new .Net framework 4.5 features in your rehosted designer application
[Minor disclaimer: content in this post is based upon a non-final release candidate build of .Net...
Date: 06/04/2012
Visual Studio 11 RC (and .Net 4.5 RC) out now!
Visual Studio 11 RC is here, and actually it’s now called “Visual Studio 2012 RC”. Obligatory link:...
Date: 05/31/2012
(WF4.5) Using CSharpValue and CSharpReference in .Net 4.5 – Compiling expressions–and changes in Visual Studio generated XAML
I’ve been publicizing for a while that Visual Studio 11 (still in Beta) supports C#...
Date: 05/24/2012
(WF4, Transactions) Implementation of Transactions in WF4, and Implications
Although I haven’t used this feature in my regular work, I’ve known for a while that WF4.0 ships...
Date: 03/13/2012