Back From Barcelona

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I arrived into SEA yesterday around 3, so I'm feeling a little bit of the 'lag from my week in Barcelona.  A few things to point out:

  • Tim has a fantastic "Vista on the M400" post.  The little dude's getting an upgrade while this gets typed, results in a future post

  • Kudos to who-ever put together this diagram.  I think it could be made a bit better by having links to the section of MSDN which further explains how to dev, say, win32 or hybrid applications, but it's a nice way to represent and download the bits you're interested in. 

  • The long awaited WF perf whitepaper is available, as Paul points out.  As Paul mentions, the 10K empty workflows per second is not a number one should run out a room assuming can be obtained, but there are a few things that I really liked seeing:

    • What happens when we scale out?
    • Should I implement a while loop in my code to loop 1000 times, or should I use the While activity?  This is one of my favorite examples when people ask "How should I think about moving to a WF driven design?"  I like this paper as it explains things in terms of trade-offs.
    • Finally, beneath figure 13, the discussion of the overhead involved with using the tracking service is discussed.  This is important, and it shows the difference between batching and not batching the "transactions" of the tracking service.  Transaction is mentioned in quotes as these have little to do with System.Transactions, rather when tracking data is written to the database.  The number to notice here is not just workflows per second, but also the increased load on the SQL Server.  Again, these are just some things to think about when you start discussing "perf" with workflow.  The papers about 50 pages long, so there's a bunch of stuff to see there.  Check it out!

  • Thanks to everyone who dropped in on my sessions in Barcelona.  I'll be posting some followup information when I get a little time to recover (or at 3:30 tomorrow morning when I am wide awake and thinking it is lunch time in Barcelona :-) )

  • There's also this page, which is a nice gateway into downloading all sorts of the things we talked about at TechEd.