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.NET Framework 3.5 bridges the gap between Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). In this first of two articles, Maurice de Beijer shows you how to use SendActivity, which enables you to call WCF as well as standard web services, in your workflows. The next article will show you how to use ReceiveActivity, which enables a developer to publish a workflow as a WCF service.

.NET Framework 3.5 bridges the gap between Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). In this first of two articles, Maurice de Beijer shows you how to use SendActivity, which enables you to call WCF as well as standard web services, in your workflows. The next article will show you how to use ReceiveActivity, which enables a developer to publish a workflow as a WCF service.

Visual Studio 2008 allows developers to build custom components for Microsoft Office System applications writing managed code. In this article see how you can create a custom task pane for Microsoft Word 2007 that integrates Text-to-Speech capabilities provided by .NET Framework.

Workflow Foundation (WF) is part of the .NET 3.0 Framework alongside Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Where WCF and WPF enable new and improved ways of doing things we have been doing for a long time, the same can’t be said for Workflow Foundation. Using Workflow Foundation enables a developer to create a whole new style of application, the long running and event driven application.

This second article about developing custom Workflow Activities takes a look at some of the more advanced aspects of Workflow Activity development. The most important of these could well be how to create event-driven activities. A lot of the power of Workflow Foundation comes from the fact that is able to react to all sorts of events so it is more than likely that our activities will need to be able to do the same.

Last year Microsoft released the .NET Framework 3.0. Unlike previous releases of the framework this version was not an upgrade or change to existing functionality but it was shipped as a number of additions to the existing .NET Framework 2.0. One of these additions was Workflow Foundation (WF), the others being Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows CardSpace. The goal of this article is to provide an overview of what Workflow Foundation is about and when or where its use would be advantageous.

Extensibility has been built into Visual Studio from its early inceptions. The great thing about Microsoft’s foresight is that you can augment functionality of Visual Studio yourself. This article will demonstrate how to extend the Visual Studio IDE using Visual Studio, the .NET Framework, and the Visual Studio Add-In and automation models.

In my previous article, Getting Started with Windows Communication Foundation, I described the basics of creating and consuming a simple WCF service. The services demonstrated used simple types like numbers and strings but most real world applications use more complex data like customers and invoices. In this article I’ll demonstrate how to work with these custom business objects in WCF.

In the last installment you learned the basics of creating a Silverlight 1.1 application and integrating that application with the HTML DOM (See Spelunking the DOM with Silverlight 1.1 - Part 1). In this installment you will integrate your Silverlight 1.1 application with an ASP.NET Web Service.

The big news from MIX was the release the Silverlight Alpha 1.1 platform. Silverlight is a browser plug in that gives developers the ability to create XAML based user interfaces that can run in Windows, Macintosh and, according to Scott Guthrie, Linux browsers in the near future. As soon as I got back from MIX I dove into building Silverlight applications using Visual Studio 2008, VB.NET, and the Silverlight SDK.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft’s next generation platform for building distributed systems. It was released as part of the .NET Framework 3.0 and is designed to consolidate and extend the APIs from previous versions of the Framework (i.e. ASP.NET Web Services, .NET Remoting, Enterprise Services (COM+), and message queuing).

In this article Jim Duffy takes us through the details of how to send email using the System.Net.Mail namespace, available in .NET Framework 2.0. Sample code and detailed explanations are given for a variety of email scenarios such as sending attachments, requesting receipt, formatting HTML mail, and much more!