I’m a fan of DI for all the benefits that it brings. Unfortunately dependency injection is not really supported with Windows Workflow.

DI is a pattern in which dependencies are calculated outside an entity and provided to the entity for it to use. The DI container is responsible for creating and managing these dependencies and injecting them onto the entity.

WF does not fully support this model. Any dependencies calculated outside a workflow must be provided to the workflow execution engine as a dictionary of input parameters. A DI container can be used resolve the dependencies, however providing them to the workflow via the workflow engine is a manual process. This means that constructor, property and method injection are not supported as you cannot use a container to resolve or build up a workflow instance.

This has been a curly one for a few months and I’ve finally had some time to resolve the issue. My team has been running TFS Build 2010 with gated check-ins where the build does MSI deploys then runs unit and integration tests.

All of a sudden the builds started failing with no indication as to why. The build activity log just stops and does not contain errors. The MS build log file also does not contain any errors. The event log on the build server does shed some light on the situation however.

Overall I love the changes made to WF4. The latest workflow support is a huge leap forward from the 3.x versions. Unfortunately both versions suffer the same issues regarding feedback for the developer when exceptions are thrown.

Consider the following simple workflow example.

Most people (myself included) assume that the Parallel and ParallelForEach<t> activities in WF4 run each child in parallel on multiple threads. Unfortunately this is not the case. Each child activity is scheduled in the workflow runtime at the same time. The child activities will only start running in “parallel” if one of the branches is in a waiting state. You can read this post which links to this post for some more detailed information

You can achieve multi-threaded parallel execution by using AsyncCodeActivity derived activities (such as InvokeMethod) with the RunAsynchronously set to True running in a Parallel or ParallelForEach<t> activity. Consider the following workflow.

My workplace has been having issues with VS2010 picking up old assemblies since we have been using VS2010 on a complex services solution. The issue usually pops up when executing test runs with the built in support for MSTest. This occasionally happened in VS2008 but is much more prevalent in 2010. The scenario seems to be that somewhere between the IDE and MSTest is picking up assemblies from prior TestResults directories if the assembly can’t be found in bin\Debug or bin\Release directories. This means that the normal clean operation under the build menu is not sufficient to get rid of this problem.

Enter the sledgehammer. I wrote a little utility that will recursively go through each bin, obj and TestResults folder under the solution path and delete everything it can (including read-only files). Any exceptions encountered will be output to the console. The code itself is really simple.

I recently posted a Unity extension for disposing build trees created by Resolve and BuildUp actions. Unity has a feature that supports lazy loading injected dependencies that the original disposal extension didn’t cater for.

Consider the following example.

David Paquette posted last year about the performance characteristics of WF4. Runtime performance is a typical complaint with WF but it can be minimised as David has indicated. Adding some caching logic for workflow activity instances will avoid the expensive start-up process for invoking activities. Subsequent activity invocations will be much faster by getting the activity instance from the cache rather than creating a new one.

I’ve put together an ActivityStore class that handles this caching requirement.

My recent post about creating proxies with RealProxy provided an example for creating a custom proxy implementation. Using proxies can provide a lot of power and flexibility to an application. Most of this code is common plumbing code that can be refactored out into some reusable classes.

The ProxyHandler class below is the first of these reusable classes. It helps with creating RealProxy types by providing the common logic of method identification, exception processing and method response management. It also provides the support for a derived proxy implementation to leverage some initialization logic provided by the calling application. It uses a MethodResolver class from my Toolkit project to identify the method to invoke on the proxy.

Yesterday I ran a couple of sessions at the Canberra .Net users group. I have attached a zip of the presentation deck and demo projects for you to have a look at in your own time.

Unity Injection With ASP.Net and WCF.zip (1.45 mb)

Mitch has just posted the agenda for CodeCampOz that is running in November. Looks like it will be a really good mix of information being presented this year.

I’ll be running a session on Windows Identity Framework and how to use it without federation. Here is the abstract for my session.

Not a WIF of federation

The Windows Identify Framework (WIF) provides the latest Microsoft implementation for working in the claims-based identity space. WIF has particular strengths in providing federated security for systems that target users across multiple security domains, multiple credential types and multiple credential stores.

Unfortunately the available WIF documentation and samples almost completely deal with federated security scenarios. The information provided continues to use federated security architectures (Security Token Services, Issuing Authorities, Relying Parties etc.) even when federation is not used.

Developers of small systems may find it difficult to understand how WIF fits into their system designs. Small systems in this context tend to have their own security store, do not cross security domains and may not even run within an Active Directory managed domain.

There are clear benefits with using claims based security in both large and small systems. How do developers leverage claims-based security without being tied to federated security architectures?

This session will briefly cover the benefits of claims-based security and then look at how to implement WIF in ASP.Net and WCF applications without federation dependencies.