Happy and honored to be going to TechEd Hong Kong again this year

I have to say - TechEd Hong Kong has been one of the best conferences I've ever been to.  The hospitality shown by the people from Microsoft is really second to none.  Hong Kong is a beautiful city to visit and the people (not just from Microsoft) were very accomodating.

 

This year, not only do I get to hang out with my old friend Bob Beauchemin - I also get to bring Shannon with me this year. I am sure we'll have a blast.

And - I get to do talks on WF/WCF (one of my current favorite topics). BAM (always one of my favorite topics) - and its integration in BizTalk Server R2. Plus - I get to do two talks on new features in Orcas and ASP.NET!

Should be a great week in Hong Kong if you are in that area of the world - sign up!

ASP.NET 2.0 | Atlas | BizTalk 2006 | BizTalk 2006 R2 | WF       Comments [0]   

On my way to Norway

To teach a Windows Workflow Foundation 5-day course.  Everyone says it will be beautiful.

 BTW - I don't plan on updating the Atlas Workflow Designer until they release the next version of Atlas - read Biertand Roy's blog about why -

Link to Atlas and more  - they are about to change from closures to prototypes.  This will be a great chance for me to re-architect the whole thing.  The next big feature will be HTML based rule editing.

ASP.NET 2.0 | Atlas       Comments [2]   

Atlas designer online

I put the code for my Atlas-based WF designer here on my site so you can try it out without having to download and install everything.  Link is http://www.masteringbiztalk.com/atlasworkflowdesigner/

 

 

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Finally some bits!

I've been teasing for a while about my Atlas-base Windows Workflow designer for a while.  Its just that although I had some basic functionality working months ago - it has taken me this long with all the other consulting and training I've been doing to actually get things working to what I consider a beta level.

So with this post I am announcing beta 1 of the Atlas Workflow Designer.  I am putting up source code - but I am releasing it under the MIT license (which basically means you can use it for any purpose - even commercial - you just have to leave my copyright notice in it so I get credit :)).

Any bug reports are welcome - although code reviews are not .  Personally I am happy with the functionality - I am not necessarily happy with the way all the code is factored.  Some of it to be perfectly honest is a total hack.  Mostly in the Atlas based "class" that runs the designer in the browser.  There is some serious refactoring that needs to get done there, which I will be working on for future releases.  Also - the persistence layer (saving the xaml and rules to the database) isn't as layered as I'd like (I have plans for a workflow persistence provider so different stores can be easily plugged in).  Also the coupling between the javascript and the service is a little tight - but that may be unavoidable in this particular application.

The biggest thing to get working better is the property grid and rules.  As of now - all you can put in for rules is "true" (yes - I know this sucks - but making a near full-featured rule editor in the browser is another big task).   There also may be some other property types that cause trouble -  but I think that is mostly taken care of.  

You can put bug reports here or email them to me - but remember - I am giving this code away essentially - I am not charging you for it .  But - if you are someone in need of consulting with WF (whether with designers or any other issues) please drop me a line :)

I'll try to post a camtasia of myself using it later so you can get a handle on how it works - plus there is a slightly weird issue in Mozilla (where you can drop the activities is pretty funky right now - but pretty much everything else works).  You'll need SQLExpress installed to get the persistence layer to work correctly (or import the mdf into SQLServer and change the connection string in the web.config). 

Anyway - enjoy - hopefully this will be useful.

AtlasWorkflowDesigner.zip (947.94 KB)

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Tech Eds

Paul is having fun at TechEd Australia talking about WF - I am looking forward to doing the same at TechEd Hong Kong at the end of September (also just looking forward to going to Hong Kong!).

I hope that the image on this page is the speaker "outfit" :)

I'll also be doing two talks on Atlas - should be a blast.

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