Question

I’m trying to write some activities with C# instead of the designer and XAML. VS2010 has been buggy and very slow for that, and it also has very poor compilation support (for variables names, properties and so on).

So I’m trying to create activities by inheriting from the Activity class directly, but I’m encountering a snag.

Here’s my code:

public class TestActivity : Activity
{
    public InArgument<string> Username { get; set; }
    public InArgument<string> Password { get; set; }
    public OutArgument<bool> ValidCredential { get; set; }
    public OutArgument<ProvisioningRole> Role { get; set; }
    public OutArgument<Guid> Guid { get; set; }

    protected override Func<Activity> Implementation
    {
        get
        {
            return () =>
                {
                    return new Sequence()
                    {
                        Activities =
                        {
                            new AuthenticateUserActivity()
                            {
                                Username = this.Username,
                                Password = this.Password,
                                Guid = this.Guid,
                                Result = this.ValidCredential
                            },
                            new If()
                            {
                                Condition = this.ValidCredential,
                                Then = new GetUserRoleActivity()
                                {
                                    Username = this.Username,
                                    Password = this.Password,
                                    Result = this.Role
                                }
                            },
                        }
                    };
                };
        }
        set { base.Implementation = value; }
    }
}

The problem is with the If(), the condition. It’s supposed to be an InArgument, but this.ValidCredential is an OutArgument. I’ve tried creating a Variable, assign the value of ValidCredential to it. I also tried to put the result of AuthenticateUserActivity in the variable and then assign it to ValidCredential, but I get an error saying the To property of Assign needs to be specified.

I’ve looked around for proper tutorials, but all I found was an MSDN article that had a quick and dirty code implementation, and it used literals instead of the passed arguments, so no help from there.

Answer 1

Going to shamelessly plug my own library that I ended up making for this:
http://code.google.com/p/system-transactions/

Allows basic compensation of code without the ginormous hassle of WF. Also, compiles properly and is easily debuggable.