Todd Kitta's

Hello all. Just thought I'd take a breather to post on my neglected blog. A few things...

My book showed up on Amazon.com recently! As I've mentioned, it's titled Professional Windows Workflow Foundation and will be published by Wrox. It's very exciting to see this up there and it's made the process seem all the more real. I'm very excited to see what people think of the book and hopefully how useful it will be.

Also, I had a great experience at last night's Saint Louis .NET User Group meeting. There was a great turnout and there were some good questions. If you were at the meeting, please drop me a line to let me know what you thought and if you have any questions.

Well, that's it for now. Hopefully I will start blogging again after the book is completed (very soon!). Advice to potential-authors: writing a book when your wife is pregnant and when the baby comes is not so easy ;-) My wife will get a BIG THANKS in the book, that's for sure.

Chris Sells has a post which is very relevant to my current book project. By the looks of it, there will be a couple WF books before mine hits the shelves. I'm thinking mine will be released late this year or very early next year.

However, I'm pretty confident that, for the same reasons Chris mentions, that I will have a leg up because I will actually be able to make changes after the technology has RTM'd.

Agree? Disagree?

As you may or may not have heard, WinFX which was the umbrella over Windows Workflow Foundation (and other technologies) has changed monikers to .NET Framework 3.0.

Along with the name change comes a new site. The Windows Workflow site has also been redesigned.

I had previously posted that I would be speaking at the May .NET UG in St. Louis covering Windows Workflow Foundation.

My talk has been moved to September 25th (my birthday!). I hope the local readers are able to drop by and check it out.

The address is:

Three City Place Drive
Suite 1100
Creve Coeur, MO 63131

As I mentioned, the event will be on 9/25 and starts at 5:30.

To make it more interesting, if anyone that will be attending has any suggestions for specific topics, drop me a line and I'll see what I can do.

Wow, you would not believe the dust I had to clear from my blog in order to make this post. I've definitely neglected my involvement in the blogosphere lately. Between everything that is going on getting ready for the baby, work, and what this post is covering, time has been at a premium!

On to the meat... I'm officially announcing here that I am currently working on a book entitled "Professional Windows Workflow Foundation" for Wrox Press. You know, those red books with the huge pictures of the authors on the front.

Currently, I'm working on Chapter 7 out of an expected 19; so I still have a while to go. It has been an interesting experience so far as I am the sole author and this is my first book. However, its been a great learning experience from the authoring perspective and digging in deep on this great new technology. I'll tell you, Reflector has been my best friend lately!

It's too far off to tell, but I imagine the book will be published late this year/early next year. I'm working my hardest to make sure this book is a great source of information for what I expect will be a flood of people learning about and adopting Windows Workflow Foundation.

Well, that's it for now. Hopefully it's not as long before you hear from me again!!! Email me at toddkitta AT gmail DOT com if you want to chat about workflow or if you have any questions/comments/suggestions regarding the book's contents.

I will be presenting on Windows Workflow Foundation at the St. Louis .NET User Group on May 22nd.

Mark your calendars! :)

Hello all. I just wanted to do a quick post to say that I'm still alive (if I have any readers left!).

I've had a lot going on in my life over the last few months. My wife and I are going to be parents for the first time later this year, so we are both very excited about that. I still consider myself a big kid, so the baby and I should get along just fine. :)

I'm also making a job move very soon; next week to be exact. So that will also be keeping me very busy.

I have another announcement to make; but I will hold you in suspense for a little while longer on that one. Perhaps in a few weeks...

I plan to get back in to posting on a regular basis, but it still may not be for a few more weeks. So if I do have any readers left, please hang in there!

I'll be in Redmond all next week for training. Anything exciting going on in the evenings?

I received the multimedia DVD promised by Microsoft covering October's BPI conference in Redmond. Nice! I've been looking forward to reviewing the presentations again.

The only disappointment was the lack of video. I was under the impression that I'd be able to pop this in the DVD player in my living room. Oh well, just a suggestion for next time.

Check out this community based site using mapping and business search: TheXboxFiles.com. Pretty slick if you ask me.

Oh yeah, and for full disclosure: I wrote it. ;-)

If you find this site useful, PLEASE spread the word! A blog post, and email to friends, anything would help!

An article I wrote on implementing Windows WF in ASP.NET has just been published on DevX.

My goal when writing the article was to spark some ideas architecturally on how to use Windows WF in a stateless environment such as ASP.NET. Even more, I wanted to see how Windows WF could behave as a page-flow engine.

Please check it out, and let me know what you think.

This is actually a post written by Randy Holloway, but since he's a very busy guy and his blog seems to be broken, he asked me to host this entry for him:

A young man walked into the Microsoft office in St. Louis a few minutes ago. He was having some trouble with his Xbox 360 with region codes and was getting errors with the console reading his new games (Kameo and PDZ). He was on the phone with our support center for hours but never was able to get through. He wants to avoid returning the console since there is nothing to exchange it for. He was close to tears.

Having no hands on experience with the 360 (the one I acquired is reserved for someone else), I fumbled around and tried to find some assistance. I also gave him my contact information and let him know that if he couldn't get some support that I'd try again to find another angle. It is little consolation since I'm focused on our server software and have no relationship whatsoever to our Xbox group. Even if I did, I doubt that there is anything I could do for him given the situation. His console may be defective or improperly imported. Either way, he is very disappointed. I tried to help, and will continue to do so although ultimately he'll probably have to return his system. I did what I could.

In reading the news I saw that a young man in Minot, ND was assaulted robbed of his Xbox 360. While efforts are being made to make amends to him (we have some tremendously generous employees), I can't help but think that we must not lose sight of the fact that this occasion isn't a happy day for everyone. This is clearly a terrible experience on what should be a very fun and memorable day.

To all of those disappointed by not being able to get a console, finding a defect in it, or worst case having yours stolen from you, I hope that you find something else to brighten your day. And for those of us that can help people to have a great launch day experience, let's try to do so. Let's try to do all that we can to make sure that are customers remember this as a positive day and a fun experience. Happy gaming.

Israel Hilerio gave a webcast today on implementing WF in ASP.NET. Overall, it was a good presentation.

One interesting tidbit was the fact that Microsoft is working on a page flow engine for ASP.NET and Windows WF. This will allow web developers to not have to worry about wiring up Windows WF workflows to their web forms.

I just submitted an article to DevX on this very subject; it should be published later this month. My approach is very similar to how Microsoft is promoting usage in ASP.NET. I'll post a link to the article once it's up.

Randy Holloway is asking if people would be interested in a tech conference in or near St. Louis.

Please email him if you have any interest. I'd love to see something like this happen. St. Louis needs more things like this.

Just released today. Nice!