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Synchronous execution of a child XOML workflow
Previously I came up with a reasonable approach to executing a child XOML workflow asynchronously but what I was really after was executing the workflow synchronously. I eventually realised that the s...
Getting a list of services loaded into the workflow runtime
Getting a list of the services loaded into the workflow runtime is pretty simple. Here's some code to do it.using System;using System.Collections.ObjectModel;using System.Workflow.Runtime;namespace Ge...
Invoking a XOML workflow from a workflow
The built-in InvokeWorkflow activity requires a compiled workflow type which isn't too useful if you're trying to execute a XOML-based workflow. Initially I thought I could compile the XOML workflow a...
Code - Charles Petzold
If he didn't have a blog, for me Charles Petzold would just be that guy who wrote the seminal book on Windows programming. But since he does have a blog, I now know he's written lots of other stuff as...
Zipping files for Windows Explorer
As part of my automated build process, I wanted to be able to ZIP up files. For this I used the excellent (and free!) ZipLib, but there a few gotchas if you want your generated ZIP files to be readabl...
Why dynamic languages suck
I had a little bit of JScript that wasn't working as expected. I stared and stared at it... For a very long time... Here it is.var splitDetails = details.split("\t");for (var i=0; i<splitDetails.Le...
Using var in C# 3.0
I hadn't really read much about the new var keyword in C# 3.0 but it had troubled me. I had assumed it was like the var keyword in JScript and meant C# was turning into a late-bound dynamic language w...
JScript.NET performance
JScript.NET doesn't really seem to have caught on too much. The reasons are clear, there is no IDE support for it in Visual Studio.NET and if the company that developed the language doesn't want to pr...
Writing software for mutant women
For me, the best part of "Dead Ringers" (the David Cronenberg film, not the mildly amusing impressions show) is the gynaecological instruments developed by one of the freaky medical twins. He's so out...
What can I do with an LCD screen and a COM port?
There is something particularly gratifying about writing software that drives other bits of hardware. I guess it's the feeling of controlling something in the real world, rather than just making squar...
Posting errors to a website
The exception logger I've written is one of the most popular pages on my proper website but I've never been completely happy with it. I've always wanted to be able to get the details of an unhandled e...
MSDN forums not very useful
How hard can it be to write some code for a web forum? After all it's a problem that has been solved thousands of times before. Well apparently it's too hard for Microsoft. I've been trying to post t...
Web applications aren't the solution to every problem
I've been working on an ASP.NET website for a while now. For the admin side of things, I've added a few pages for updating the database and such like. There have always been problems with updating the...
The problem with LINQ
In principle it sounds like a great idea. Rather than having to learn SQL, XPath and whatever other query language you care to mention, just learn LINQ and use it to access any data source you li...
Are we in a fast moving industry?
It's virtually taken for granted that we work in a fast moving industry and the facts would appear to back up this theory. Just look at the new programming tools coming out of Microsoft (I'm just goin...
Increment by increment
Popular music lyrics don't often use the word "increment" so I was pleased to hear British Sea Power use it on their first album. In fact they use quite a few unusual words and phrases. But "incr...
Visual Studio Express 2008
I'm a big fan of the Visual Studio Express 2005 range of products. They cost nothing and are pretty powerful. In some respects they're better than the full-blown version of Visual Studi...
The Complicators
I was under the impression that computing was meant to make our life easier, but it seems there's a bunch of people out there who want to make my life more difficult through poorly thought out AP...
How to solve virtually any technical problem
People ask me technical questions all the time. I have no idea why, I don't know any more than anyone, perhaps the fact I can find the answer to these problems leads people to think I actually know th...
No really, total rewrites don't make sense
I just found this fairly old blog post about rewriting Delphi apps in C# which sits so well with how I think (and puts the point across far more eloquently than I could ever do) that I had to post the...