Hilton Giesenow's Jumbled Mind

Windows Workflow - A Paradigm Shift

I think much of the resistance Microsoft is going to face in the WF space is going to come from the paradigm shift we're required to make, especially in the whole framework vs. server space. Most people who have used workflow tools, such as K2.net and Biztalk, see them purely from the point of view of business process workflows and also with an understanding only of sequential workflows.

The sequential vs. state machine issue is less of a direct issue, but in some ways it's part of the same discussion because it's about the mindset. The people I'm talking about need to break the mental / marketing barrier to see how WF can have great power for other purposes as well, like UI flow, dynamic line of business applications (through designer re-hosting) and the ability to use to create any kind of dynamic, flexible flow or state-based "algorithm", so to speak. The idea of workflows also not only being hosted within a server but really just graphically modelling code, even on the client machine, is also going to take some getting used to....

It's going to be a very interesting space and the onus is on us who're passionate about knowledge sharing and community to make sure we get the right message out because I believe this product deserves some serious attention.

Windows Service Installation Error - "Creating EventLog source in log Application"

I was fighting with getting a windows service installed onto our dev box earlier and this is the error I was getting: "Creating EventLog source  in log Application". Googling didn't find me any solutions, just others with the problem, so hopefully this post will be of help to anyone else struggling with it.

The error returned is:

An exception occurred during the Install phase.
System.ArgumentException: Must specify value for source.

The key thing to notice is that there are 2 space characters in the phrase between "source" and "in log", which implies that the name was not being set correctly. The solution is a bit unclear but actually quite simple. The Visual Studio (2003) designer was showing me what I had entered in the properties box for the services I was trying to install but when I switched to code view and looked in the InitializeComponent method they were not there. I added the following lines for each service:

this.externalSystemStatusInstaller.ServiceName = "[service name]";

this.externalSystemStatusInstaller.DisplayName = "[service displayname]";

this.externalSystemStatusInstaller.StartType = [startup type];