Using Workflow4 extensions

Workflow Foundation 4 allows you to add your own custom activities in code. You have a choice of CodeActivity, AsyncCodeActivity and NativeActivity.  CodeActivity is ideal if you want to add a simple activity that doesn’t block. AsyncCodeActivity is great if you need an activity that needs to d... [More]

Service oriented architecture in SQL Server with Service Broker

Wouldn’t it be nice if a stored procedure could run certain statements in parallel, if we could easily scale out SQL Server applications,… When you have code that can run asynchronously, all these things become possible, if you implement them with the Service Broker: Service Broker is an service ori... [More]

An Office WPF Ribbon Control Walkthrough

The Microsoft WPF Ribbon control is a free control that brings the Office 2007 Ribbon features to your WPF applications. To get your hands on it, just follow the instructions on CodePlex. This article walks through the Ribbon features. I simply built "NotePad with a Ribbon". Here's how it looks like... [More]

Webcast on Parallel Computing

A couple of weeks ago, I did a webcast on Parallel Computing available on channel9 at http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/adebruyn/MSDN-Live-Meeting-Visual-Studio-2010-and-NET-4-Update The presentation can  be downloaded at : ParallelComputing.pdf In addition, you can also download my demos  ... [More]

Webcast on Parallel Computing

A couple of weeks ago, I did a webcast on Parallel Computing available on channel9 at http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/adebruyn/MSDN-Live-Meeting-Visual-Studio-2010-and-NET-4-Update The presentation can  be downloaded at : ParallelComputing.pdf In addition, you can also download my demos  ... [More]

Blogging Frenzy

Looks like I started to blog a lot more lately, and so do a couple of my colleagues. Check out Nick’s blog: http://blogs.u2u.be/Nick/  And of course Kris’s blog: http://blogs.u2u.be/Kris/ Both of them have gone crazy with Extension methods… So should I?

Charting with WPF and Silverlight

Sometimes we need to decorate our WPF or Silverlight applications with things like bar charts or pie charts. There's no need to create these from scratch, since a lot of charting solutions are available, some of which are free while other are ... less free. On CodePlex you find the Silverlight Toolk... [More]

Static Reflection in .NET, part 2

A few weeks ago, I talked about static reflection and its advantages. You’ll remember that the main advantages, compared to the normal reflection API’s, are the compile time checking of parameters and IntelliSense support. How does it compare at other levels, performance for example? Before we dive... [More]

Cool! Copy as image in workflow foundation designer

Hey, I build slides a lot, so I like this cool feature in workflow foundation 4 designer (using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2): copy as image. If you need to copy a workflow (or part thereof this only works for the whole workflow, a pity, because you will want copy parts of your orchestration to a docu... [More]

WCF Streaming

1. Configuring and Tracing WCF can send messages in buffered mode and in streaming mode. The default is buffered mode, which means that the whole message needs to be transfered and received before the client can start processing it. When messages get too large to be send as one big blob and when t... [More]