Philip Wolfe - Just the idea guy

Gieco doesn't insure everything, go with State Farm

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

When I was a Gieco customer, they wouldn't insure my classic Mustang. They referred me to a different company for the Mustang. There wouldn't be any discounts and the kicker...I had to have been a licensed driver for 10 years (which I wasn't at the the time!) Because they wouldn't insure the Mustang, I dropped Gieco and moved my car back to State Farm. I highly recommend State Farm. I can call my agent and tell them my first name and they can look up my account because they know me. (and that is without caller id!) They adjust my coverage when I am not driving my car in the winter and they advise me on the best coverage for my family.

Good experience with Best Buy

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 05:00:00 GMT

One of the posts I have been meaning to do...

I had two great experiences with Best Buy lately. The first related to getting a price adjustment for an item that a local competitor was selling. All I had to do was bring in a print out of their website and they matched the price. It was way easier than I thought it would be. I thought that I would have to box up the product and take it all back in. I called ahead and they told me just to bring in the print out.

The other one was related to using a coupon with an item on sale. The coupon would not work on sale items, so they forced the computer to bring the item back to full price so I could get the better deal with the coupon. It was great. Customer Service made it happen when the TV salesman couldn't. He was ~~a little~~ not very competent.

Last Post of the year...

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

...dedicated to Backwoods and Marmot.

Here is E and I with my new Marmot fleece jacket on December 30th. It is 54 degrees in Omaha! Almost to warm for the jacket.

Do you want to get involved with Microsoft exams?

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:00:00 GMT

http://www.studiob.com/jobs.cfm#.NET%20Certification%20exams%20-%20Alpha%20Reviewers%20Needed

About Me: My Favorite Notepad Replacement

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:50:00 GMT

I am quite fond of Notepad2 with the enhancements found at this site. It is lightweight and fast. It doesn't try to do to much and just enough that it will be an instant favorite. I recommend using the installer as it will replace calls to your current Notepad so that Notepad2 is launched.

About Me: My Favorite File Sync Tool

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:45:00 GMT

I am quite fond of Allway Sync. Check them out at http://www.allwaysync.com. I would however recommend version 6.1.6. I think this is the last version before an annoying message or limitation about the number of bytes it can/will sync. File Hippo can't even help out on this one. Google or ask around for it.

State Machines in WWF 4

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:30:00 GMT

This post is long overdue but I couldn't believe that State Machine workflows aren't a first class citizen in .NET 4.0. This revelation came after reading a few articles last year. They tried to make it seem OK and that this was a good decision. They are wrong. At Tech Ed in LA I was able to speak to several product team members, industry thought leaders, and program managers in the connected systems teams. After explaining that a State Machine is the best design for processes that are similar to "application processing" like a car loan or life insurance where the process takes from 1 day to 2 weeks or more, they all agreed that Microsoft's decision wasn't right. They should have brought the State Machine along before creating the Flowchart Workflow. Some suggested a design with a Pick Activity that would loop and have a leg for each state. Again, a bad upgrade scenario for customers.

Along with that major complaint, I couldn't believe that they switched completely from DependencyPropertys to passing arguments to activities. I don't agree with this decision either. I will agree that DependencyPropertys are hard to understand at first, but in the end they are the best design for workflows. In my opinion it seems that the team working on this version of workflow didn't understand the previous version and decided to rewrite it. Some at Tech Ed said that this isn't true. The team did understand it but need to make this huge change because this is where Microsoft wants to be going forward. Thanks for the terrible upgrade scenarios for the early adopters!

Regardless, WWF 3 will still work side by side with version 4 and VS10 supports v3 in the designer! Win for us even though the designer pretty much sucks. For now our team will stick with v3 because it is the right design and we will continue to enhance it with new activities and possibly an open source designer.

I am very excited for some upcoming posts. I would like to share with everyone some cool activities we are using as well as a design pattern and best practice for using a State Machine Workflow. It allows the State Machine to call Sequence workflows synchronously. It will also show a best practice for WCF hosting without Microsoft's WCF activities (which, also in my opinion, stink because they tie you to a communication technology).