The art of simplicity

After configuring an ASP.NET MVC application to use WIF and ADFS, authentication failed with the following error message: The Federation Service could not fulfill the token-issuance request because the relying party 'https://localhost/ADFSSampleApp' is missing a WS-Federation Passive endpoint address. Relying party: https://localhost/ADFSSampleApp The problem was that I forgot to configure an endpoint address for the relying party configuration in ADFS. To do this, execute the following steps: Open the ADFS Management snap-in Go to the list of Relying Parties Click on the application you want to configure. Go to the properties and open the Endpoints tab Add the URL of your web app That should fix the problem…

Last week Microsoft released the Workflow Foundation (WF) Activity Pack for Windows Azure. The package is also available via NuGet (Package name=WFAzureActivityPack) and through their CodePlex page . “The WF Activity Pack for Windows Azure CTP 1 is the first community technology preview (CTP) release of Windows Azure activities implementation based on Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET Framework 4.0 (WF4) and Windows Azure SDK. The implementation contains a set of activities based on Windows Azure Storage Service and Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service , which enables developers to easily access these Azure services within a workflow application.” The current release includes the following Workflow activities: For Windows Azure Storage Service - Blob PutBlob creates a new block blob, or replace an existing block blob. GetBlob downloads the binary content of a blob. DeleteBlob deletes a blob if it exists. CopyBlob copies a blob to a destination withi...

After creating a custom Workflow 4 activity, I was planning to add it to our existing build process  template. However after adding the activity to the toolbox in Visual Studio, I couldn’t drop the activity on the workflow designer. The reason is that the workflow designer is not able to find the assembly containing the custom activity. There are multiple solutions out there to solve this problem. Probably the easiest one is adding the assembly to the GAC. Two other alternatives are: Adding the process template to a project and reference the assembly from this project. Adding the assembly to a location where Visual Studio will find it (e.g.  ..\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies). If you want to know more about customizing the build process template, I can recommend the following blog series by Ewald Hofman: Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Add arguments and variables Part 3: Use more complex arguments Part 4: Cre...

With the new build engine based on Workflow 4 in Team Foundation Server 2010, creating build definitions and automatic builds became a lot easier. One of the most useful activities is the InvokeProcess activity. This activity offers the following important properties: Arguments: the argument values you want to pass to the invoked process FileName: name of the process you want to execute WorkingDirectory: location from which the process should be invoked. One feature that makes debugging a lot easier is that you can setup the activity for logging(by default nothing will be logged other than the command line invoked). If you expand the activity in the designer, you can see that the Standard and Error output is captured in two variables( stdOutput and stdError ). You can then add the WriteBuildMessage and WriteBuildError activities by dragging them from the toolbox into the handler areas of the InvokeProcess activity.

With the release of .NET Framework 4, Microsoft completely rewrote the Windows Workflow Foundation(WF) implementation. One of the consequences was that the original workflow types(state machine and sequential) were replaced by a new sequential and flowchart implementation leaving state machines out of the picture. With the Microsoft WF State Machine Activity Pack CTP 1 Microsoft reintroduces a state machine implementation based on Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET Framework 4 (WF 4). The implementation contains not only a state machine runtime but also a graphical state machine designer. It’s a really great and robust CTP for everyone who needs state machine workflows. Thank you, Microsoft.