Unpleasant surprise after installing Visual Studio SP1

Trevor E Hilder

Dear all,

Beware of installing Visual Studio SP1 if you have Workflow Foundation Extensions for Visual Studio installed.

Everything looks ok until you try to create a new workflow. At this point, the binding of activity properties to dependency properties refuses to work. None of the dependency properties appear as valid choices for binding to.

Also, the workflow snippets no longer work.

There is a simple solution to these woes:

Run the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation setup program and Repair your installation.

This is not mentioned anywhere in the VS2005 SP1 release notes.

Kavita Kamani - MSFT

Thanks for reporting this issue. I've passed this feedback to the right people.

kushals

Trevor -

I was able to bind to the Dependency properties as expected. Can you describe your scenario a bit.

Yes - the Code Snippet does not seem to work and your workaround gets me past the problem. We will get it resolved soon.

Thanks,

Kushal.

Trevor E Hilder

Dear Kushal,

I'm glad you can reproduce the issue with the workflow snippets.

Having created a new Sequential Workflow, I set up some dependency properties by copying them from another workflow, then amending them to be correct for the new workflow.

I then dragged a SqlDatabaseActivity out of the Toolbox, and tried to bind its properties to some of those dependency properties. However, none of the valid dependency properties were identified as being candidates to be bound, so this could not be done.

The dependency properties that should have been candidates were of type string.

After repairing the Workflow Extensions, everything worked as expected.

kushals

Trevor -

I rebuilt the entire machine, got VS 2005, .NET 3.0, VS Extensions, VS SP1 and tried exactly what you told but still can't repro the problem.

Which bits of WF are you using

Thanks,

Kushal.

Mark Goldstein

Hi,

I installed VS2005 SP1 recently, and then WSSF.

Now I noticed that I have no WF snippets at all.

Is it possible to download WF snippets from somewhere

Thank you

kushals

Mark -

Yes - We are looking into the issues. Regarding downloading the snippets. No - Currently we do not have them anywhere downloadable. But as the post mentions the workaround for a while would be to reinstall the VS Extensions for WF.

Also we would try to make the snippets available as seperate downloadables soon! Thanks for the suggestion :)

Thanks,

Kushal.

Trevor E Hilder

Dear Kushal,

We are developing an application hosted under asp.net 2.0. It has a number of sequential and state machine workflows in it, and communicates from asp.net to the workflows using an adapted version of the communication classes from the HelpDeskSupport sample app.

I have supplied a cut-down version of this app to Angel Azcarraga so that he could reproduce another bug I found. Perhaps this would also enable you to reproduce this issue If you cannot obtain it from Angel, let me know where you want me to send it, and I'll get a copy to you.