Random Thoughts

Introduction I have always found the Windows Workflow Foundation an intriguing technology because of the potential it has to truly separate business logic out of our code and into an easily maintainable, visually pleasing format.  Though it is used quite heavily in SharePoint to manage things like approval processes, unfortunately I haven’t seen it leveraged in very many custom built applications.  I think this is probably due to the lack of knowledge around the technology as well as the difficultly in building out the scaffolding to fully integrate it into a custom application.  There are dozens of articles on the Internet that show you how to build a simple “Hello World” workflow.  But it is a rather big jump to get it up and running in your application.  I’m speaking from personal experience. It has been a while since I’ve worked with Workflow Foundation so I haven’t had the opportunity to explore the changes that came in version 4.0 of the .NET Framework....

One of the features of the new Windows Phone 7 that I really like is the full integration of Facebook into the People Hub.  The People Hub is like your traditional mobile phone contact list on steroids.  Not only does it store the contact information for all of your friends, family and colleagues, but if you have a Facebook account, you can configure the People Hub to pull in updates for all of your friends as well. The reason why this feature is so great is that Facebook updates are not limited to just status messages and picture posts, but includes your friends’ actual contact information as well.  This means that if one of your friends update their phone number or address on Facebook, that information is synchronized to your phone immediately.  I no longer have to chase people down for their contact information when it changes. This feature was somewhat available in the past on iPhone using the Facebook application.  You could browse your friends in the F...