Orcas additions

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Though there are countless additions in Orcas I would highlight the ones I have been working on for the past one year. You can post questions regarding these features and I would help you out or at least point you to the right resources as needed.

1. Silver -

The Silver project is the unification of the WF and WCF programming frameworks. The project aims at using Workflows as a way to author Services. There are several different aspects of this project like the run time model, the tools and the activities and the programming model.

 

I have been specifically working on the tools aspect of this project. In a Workflow project, under the toolbox look for the Receive and the Send activity within the .NET Framework 3.5 tab. I have been contributing to that :-)

 

2. Rules -

Enhanced language support in Workflow Rules:

  • Added support for operator overloading
  • Added support for the “new” operator to allow users to new up objects and arrays from WF Rules
  • Added support for extension methods to make user’s experience calling extension methods from WF Rules compatible with how they code in C#

Again I have been working here on the validation aspect of these rules built using the rules editor within VisualStudio or hosted outside.

3. WF Designer/Debugger Integration:

The WF designer and debugger, which previously shipped as an add-on for Visual Studio 2005, are now integrated out-of-box features of Visual Studio Codename "Orcas".

 

4. Project Aggregation:

 

Flavoring/Aggregation allows the users to use the standard Visual Studio IDE functionality provided by the project type and add/tweak features as needed to provide a custom IDE interface and integrate seamlessly with the standard project type. For example – The Workflow Projects is a flavor on top of C# and VB project systems.

 

For Orcas we have enabled the flavoring on top of the Workflow projects to created customized workflow project definitions.

 

Next time, I will list what other features our team as a whole has been working on. The other blog I am planning to write is to elaborate more on the Project Aggregation aspect within Workflows since I think there is very little documentation provided for the same.

 

Thanks,

Kushal.