How to create a simple Workflow Foundation (WF) activity

Quite suddenly, with no prior warning whatsoever, I resolved with firm determination that I will without further delay inflict upon unsuspecting world, my first screen recorded, poorly narrated technical tutorial. After many failed attempts with many miserable little screen capture programs, I finally managed to put something together using a trial edition of Camtasia which in my opinion is a stunningly useful piece of software if you dig this sort of impulsive screen recording fits. I just wish it didn't cost quite as much as it does.

The tutorial is a short 20 minute video that shows you how you can create an extremely simple, fairly useless workflow activity using the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). It shows you how you can create a workflow that uses the activity and then how you can host the runtime and execute the workflow.

The Camtasia produced Flash file has been hosted on a site called Hot Link Files who in their boundless magnanimity allow basically everybody to host whatever they want on their servers and happily provide URLs to those files. Go Hot Link Files! They do have a clause however that they'll delete this file after 30 days of inactivity (note to self: figure out another cheap stingy way of hosting files and not spend American dollars).

[Update (22-Aug):I have since then changed my hosting provider and now have a gigabyte of disk space which is considerably more than the 20 MB that I used to scrounge with earlier and have therefore moved the SWF file for this movie on to my web server itself. It did cost American dollars though (dang!).]

Without further mindless blathering then, here's the tutorial. Oh, one more thing - unless you take great delight in squinting at the screen trying to make out extremely small text you might want to click the full-screen button on the video player below; you should find a small button that looks like a cross-hair on the bottom right hand corner of the player once you start playback and clicking it will hopefully launch the player in full-screen mode.

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