A interesting question that came up last week was how to convert workflows defined in C# to XAML. co worker of one of the attendees of the Essential Windows Workflow Foundation 4 course had been experiencing a lot of problems with the workflow designer and decided to create their workflows in C# instead of using the designer to generate XAML. While these workflows run just fine you do lose the visual aspect of the designer, one of the benefits of workflow in the first place. Take the following workflow defined in C#. And now I can continue enhancing the XAML version and run that instead. Enjoy!

Ed Yourdon seems to have fallen off my radar so far this century. Last century I read a lot of his stuff and came to respect him as a man who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to IT and software development. If you haven’t heard of him, or don’t believe me just look at the list of books he’s written.) I recently discovered that he has a blog , and from there that he has recently been to the Agile 2010 conference. In fact it appears that the whole Agile thing has, to a large part, passed him by.

Modern Analyst has published my latest piece about Agile at the company level: Objective Agility - what does it take to be an Agile company? This is actually a bit of a taster for a presentation of with the same title I’ll be doing at the IIBA Business Analysis conference in a few weeks. And talking of businesses analysis. am running an ‘Essential Agile for Business Analysts’ at Skills Matter in a few weeks. Many of these themes come up in that course. believe there is still space available.

Neno Loje blogged about an important update that is available and should be installed by everyone that uses Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010. It enables Lab Management, but also installs all hot fixes that have been made available since 2010 became available. Neno’s FAQ says it all: Frequently asked questions. Should I install the update although I do not use Lab Management? Yes, it contains all TFS fixes that have been made since TFS 2010. Is this a Service Pack ? If I reinstall or add TFS components later, do I have to reapply this patch? More on: [link].

Don’t conservatives idolize Friedrich Hayek? The love is not mutual. Hayek hates that conservatives are close-minded morons afraid of new knowledge, e.g. evolution. From “ Why I am not a conservative “: I can have little patience with those who oppose, for instance, the theory of evolution or what are called “mechanistic&# explanations of the phenomena of life because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irrelevant or impious to ask certain questions at all.

There are times when a workflow can't be persisted safely using a SqlWorkflowInstanceStore. The reason isn't so much saving the state of a workflow to disk, that could be done at any time, but the result when a workflow would be reloaded from disk in that state. An easy example is a workflow handling a WCF request with a Receive and SendReply activity pair. Suppose you would save the workflow state after the message had been received but before the response had been send. No problem there. Now suppose the workflow is aborted just after the response is send and later the saved state is reloaded.

A little bit late, but the invitation for the first Maine Code Camp just went out! When: August 27th, 28th, 29th, 2010. Where: Mt. Blue State Park, Weld, Maine ( Link to offical site ). Sign up: [link]. More info: [link].